Posts in category: Apple

Can Transformers predict new syllogisms by composing established ones? More generally, what type of targets can be learned by such models from scratch? Recent works show that Transformers can be Turing-complete in terms of expressivity, but this does not address the learnability objective. This paper puts forward the notion of distribution locality to capture when weak learning is efficiently achievable by regular Transformers, where the locality measures the least number of tokens required in addition to the tokens histogram to correlate nontrivially with the target. As shown experimentally…Apple Machine Learning Research

Open Domain Question Answering (ODQA) within natural language processing involves building systems that answer factual questions using large-scale knowledge corpora. Recent advances stem from the confluence of several factors, such as large-scale training datasets, deep learning techniques, and the rise of large language models. High-quality datasets are used to train models on realistic scenarios and enable the evaluation of the system on potentially unseen data. Standardized metrics facilitate comparisons between different ODQA systems, allowing researchers to objectively track advancements…Apple Machine Learning Research

This paper was accepted at the Industry Track at NAACL 2024.
With increasingly more powerful compute capabilities and resources in today’s devices, traditionally compute-intensive automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been moving from the cloud to devices to better protect user privacy. However, it is still challenging to implement on-device ASR on resource-constrained devices, such as smartphones, smart wearables, and other small home automation devices. In this paper, we propose a series of model architecture adaptions, neural network graph transformations, and numerical optimizations to…Apple Machine Learning Research

Voice activity detection (VAD) is a critical component in various applications such as speech recognition, speaker identification, and hands-free communication systems. With the increasing demand for personalized and context-aware technologies, the need for effective personalized VAD systems has become paramount. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of Personalized Voice Activity Detection (PVAD) systems to assess their real-world effectiveness. We introduce a comprehensive approach to assess PVAD systems, incorporating various performance metrics such as frame-level and…Apple Machine Learning Research

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for human-like conversations, they are primarily pre-trained on text data. Incorporating audio or video improves performance, but collecting large-scale multimodal data and pre-training multimodal LLMs is challenging. To this end, we propose a Fusion Low Rank Adaptation (FLoRA) technique that efficiently adapts a pre-trained unimodal LLM to consume new, previously unseen modalities via low rank adaptation. For device-directed speech detection, using FLoRA, the multimodal LLM achieves 22% relative reduction in equal error rate (EER) over…Apple Machine Learning Research

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for human-like conversations, they are primarily pre-trained on text data. Incorporating audio or video improves performance, but collecting large-scale multimodal data and pre-training multimodal LLMs is challenging. To this end, we propose a Fusion Low Rank Adaptation (FLoRA) technique that efficiently adapts a pre-trained unimodal LLM to consume new, previously unseen modalities via low rank adaptation. For device-directed speech detection, using FLoRA, the multimodal LLM achieves 22% relative reduction in equal error rate (EER) over…Apple Machine Learning Research

This paper was accepted in the Industry Track at SIGIR 2024.
Virtual Assistants (VAs) are important Information Retrieval platforms that help users accomplish various tasks through spoken commands. The speech recognition system (speech-to-text) uses query priors, trained solely on text, to distinguish between phonetically confusing alternatives. Hence, the generation of synthetic queries that are similar to existing VA usage can greatly improve upon the VA’s abilities-especially for use-cases that do not (yet) occur in paired audio/text data.
In this paper, we provide a preliminary exploration…Apple Machine Learning Research

On-device Virtual Assistants powered by Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) require effective knowledge integration for the challenging entity-rich query recognition.
In this paper, we conduct an empirical study of modeling strategies for server-side rescoring of spoken information domain queries using various categories of Language Models (N-Gram word Language Models, sub-word neural LMs).
We investigate the combination of on-device and server-side signals, and demonstrate significant WER improvements of 23%-35% on various entity-centric query subpopulations
by integrating various server-side…Apple Machine Learning Research

Voice assistants increasingly use on-device Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to ensure speed and privacy. However, due to resource constraints on the device, queries pertaining to complex information domains often require further processing by a search engine. For such applications, we propose a novel Transformer based model capable of rescoring and rewriting, by exploring full context of the N-best hypotheses in parallel. We also propose a new discriminative sequence training objective that can work well for both rescore and rewrite tasks. We show that our Rescore+Rewrite model outperforms…Apple Machine Learning Research

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capability in different tasks and are bringing transformative changes to many domains. However, keeping the knowledge in LLMs up-to-date remains a challenge once pretraining is complete. It is thus essential to design effective methods to both update obsolete knowledge and induce new knowledge into LLMs. Existing locate-and-edit knowledge editing (KE) method suffers from two limitations. First, the post-edit LLMs by such methods generally have poor capability in answering complex queries that require multi-hop reasoning. Second, the…Apple Machine Learning Research