Posts in category: Apple

Much of early literacy education happens at home with caretakers reading books to young children. Prior research demonstrates how having dialogue with children during co-reading can develop critical reading readiness skills, but most adult readers are unsure if and how to lead effective conversations. We present ContextQ, a tablet-based reading application to unobtrusively present auto-generated dialogic questions to caretakers to support this dialogic reading practice. An ablation study demonstrates how our method of encoding educator expertise into the question generation pipeline can…Apple Machine Learning Research

Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging ML training paradigm where clients own their data and collaborate to train a global model without revealing any data to the server and other participants.
Researchers commonly perform experiments in a simulation environment to quickly iterate on ideas. However, existing open-source tools do not offer the efficiency required to simulate FL on larger and more realistic FL datasets. We introduce pfl-research, a fast, modular, and easy-to-use Python framework for simulating FL. It supports TensorFlow, PyTorch, and non-neural network models, and is tightly…Apple Machine Learning Research

Large Language Model or LLM inference has two phases, the prompt (or prefill) phase to output the first token and the extension (or decoding) phase to the generate subsequent tokens. In this work, we propose an efficient parallelization scheme, KV-Runahead to accelerate the prompt phase. The key observation is that the extension phase generates tokens faster than the prompt phase because of key-value cache (KV-cache). Hence, KV-Runahead parallelizes the prompt phase by orchestrating multiple processes to populate the KV-cache and minimizes the time-to-first-token (TTFT). Dual-purposing the…Apple Machine Learning Research

This paper introduces a novel generative modeling framework grounded in phase space dynamics, taking inspiration from the principles underlying Critically Damped Langevin Dynamics (CLD). Leveraging insights from stochastic optimal control, we construct a favorable path measure in the phase space that proves highly advantageous for generative sampling. A distinctive feature of our approach is the early-stage data prediction capability within the context of propagating generating Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) or Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs) processes. This early prediction…Apple Machine Learning Research

This paper has been accepted at the Data Problems for Foundation Models workshop at ICLR 2024.
Large language models are trained on massive scrapes of the web, which are often unstructured, noisy, and poorly phrased. Current scaling laws show that learning from such data requires an abundance of both compute and data, which grows with the size of the model being trained. This is infeasible both because of the large compute costs and duration associated with pre-training, and the impending scarcity of high-quality data on the web. In this work, we proposeWebRephrase Augmented Pre-training…Apple Machine Learning Research

Apple Machine Learning Research

Apple Machine Learning Research

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) pretrained on massive datasets exhibit impressive performance on various downstream tasks, especially with limited labeled target data. However, due to their high inference compute cost, these models cannot be deployed for many real-world applications. Motivated by this, we ask the following important question, “How can we leverage the knowledge from a large VFM to train a small task-specific model for a new target task with limited labeled training data?”, and propose a simple task-oriented knowledge transfer approach as a highly effective solution to this…Apple Machine Learning Research

Conformal prediction (CP) for regression can be challenging, especially when the output distribution is heteroscedastic, multimodal, or skewed. Some of the issues can be addressed by estimating a distribution over the output, but in reality, such approaches can be sensitive to estimation error and yield unstable intervals. Here, we circumvent the challenges by converting regression to a classification problem and then use CP for classification to obtain CP sets for regression. To preserve the ordering of the continuous-output space, we design a new loss function and make necessary…Apple Machine Learning Research

Rendering scenes observed in a monocular video from novel viewpoints is a chal- lenging problem. For static scenes the community has studied both scene-specific optimization techniques, which optimize on every test scene, and generalized tech- niques, which only run a deep net forward pass on a test scene. In contrast, for dy- namic scenes, scene-specific optimization techniques exist, but, to our best knowl- edge, there is currently no generalized method for dynamic novel view synthesis from a given monocular video. To explore whether generalized dynamic novel view synthesis from monocular…Apple Machine Learning Research