Posts in category: Apple

Many apps have basic accessibility issues, like missing labels or low contrast. Automated tools can help app developers catch basic issues, but can be laborious to run or require writing dedicated tests. In this work, we developed a system to generate accessibility reports from mobile apps through a collaborative process with accessibility stakeholders at Apple. Our method combines varied data collection methods (e.g., app crawling, manual recording) with an existing accessibility scanner. Many such scanners are based on single-screen scanning, and a key problem in whole app accessibility…Apple Machine Learning Research

This paper was accepted at the Foundation Models in the Wild workshop at ICML 2024.
Diffusion models have become the de-facto approach for generating visual data, which are trained to match the distribution of the training dataset. In addition, we also want to control generation to fulfill desired properties such as alignment to a text description, which can be specified with a black-box reward function. Prior works fine-tune pretrained diffusion models to achieve this goal through reinforcement learning-based algorithms. Nonetheless, they suffer from issues including slow credit assignment as…Apple Machine Learning Research

This paper has been accepted at the Foundation Models in the Wild workshop at ICML 2024.
Large language models are versatile tools but are not suitable for small inference budgets. Small models have more efficient inference but their lower capacity means that their performance can be good only if one limits their scope to a specialized domain. This paper explores how to get a small language model with good specialized accuracy, even when specialization data is unknown during pretraining. We propose a novel architecture, projected networks (PN). PN is a high capacity network whose parameters…Apple Machine Learning Research

Secure aggregation of high-dimensional vectors is a fundamental primitive in federated statistics and learning. A two-server system such as PRIO allows for scalable aggregation of secret-shared vectors. Adversarial clients might try to manipulate the aggregate, so it is important to ensure that each (secret-shared) contribution is well-formed. In this work, we focus on the important and well-studied goal of ensuring that each contribution vector has bounded Euclidean norm. Existing protocols for ensuring bounded-norm contributions either incur a large communication overhead, or only allow for…Apple Machine Learning Research

Apple Machine Learning Research

While Ferret seamlessly integrates regional understanding into the Large Language Model (LLM) to facilitate its referring and grounding capability, it poses certain limitations: constrained by the pre-trained fixed visual encoder and failed to perform well on broader tasks. In this work, we unveil Ferret-v2, a significant upgrade to Ferret, with three key designs. (1) Any resolution grounding and referring: A flexible approach that effortlessly handles higher image resolution, improving the model’s ability to process and understand images in greater detail. (2) Multi-granularity visual…Apple Machine Learning Research

In 1991, Brenier proved a theorem that generalizes the polar decomposition for square matrices — factored as PSD ×times× unitary — to any vector field F:Rd→RdF:mathbb{R}^drightarrow mathbb{R}^dF:Rd→Rd. The theorem, known as the polar factorization theorem, states that any field FFF can be recovered as the composition of the gradient of a convex function uuu with a measure-preserving map MMM, namely F=∇u∘MF=nabla u circ MF=∇u∘M. We propose a practical implementation of this far-reaching theoretical result, and explore possible uses within machine learning. The theorem is closely related…Apple Machine Learning Research

In this work, we study how well the learned weights of a neural network utilize the space available to them. This notion is related to capacity, but additionally incorporates the interaction of the network architecture with the dataset. Most learned weights appear to be full rank, and are therefore not amenable to low rank decomposition. This deceptively implies that the weights are utilizing the entire space available to them. We propose a simple data-driven transformation that projects the weights onto the subspace where the data and the weight interact. This preserves the functional mapping…Apple Machine Learning Research

We investigate the out-of-domain generalization of random feature (RF) models and Transformers. We first prove that in the ‘generalization on the unseen (GOTU)’ setting, where training data is fully seen in some part of the domain but testing is made on another part, and for RF models in the small feature regime, the convergence takes place to interpolators of minimal degree as in the Boolean case (Abbe et al., 2023). We then consider the sparse target regime and explain how this regime relates to the small feature regime, but with a different regularization term that can alter the picture in…Apple Machine Learning Research

Large Language Model (LLM) agents, capable of performing a broad range of actions, such as invoking tools and controlling robots, show great potential in tackling real-world challenges. LLM agents are typically prompted to produce actions by generating JSON or text in a pre-defined format, which is usually limited by constrained action space (e.g., the scope of pre-defined tools) and restricted flexibility (e.g., inability to compose multiple tools). This work proposes to use executable Python code to consolidate LLM agents’ actions into a unified action space (CodeAct). Integrated with a…Apple Machine Learning Research