Posts in category: Apple

We present Recurrent Drafter (ReDrafter), an advanced speculative decoding approach that achieves state-of-the-art speedup for large language models (LLMs) inference. The performance gains are driven by three key aspects: (1) leveraging a recurrent neural network (RNN) as the draft model conditioning on LLM’s hidden states, (2) applying a dynamic tree attention algorithm over beam search results to eliminate duplicated prefixes in candidate sequences, and (3) training through knowledge distillation from the LLM. ReDrafter accelerates Vicuna inference in MT-Bench by up to 3.5x with a PyTorch…Apple Machine Learning Research

This paper was accepted at the Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP) Workshop at NeurIPS 2024.
Large Language Models (LLMs) typically generate outputs token by token using a fixed compute budget, leading to inefficient resource utilization. To address this shortcoming, recent advancements in mixture of expert (MoE) models, speculative decoding, and early exit strategies leverage the insight that computational demands can vary significantly based on the complexity and nature of the input. However, identifying optimal routing patterns for dynamic execution remains an open…Apple Machine Learning Research

This paper considers the learning of logical (Boolean) functions with a focus on the generalization on the unseen (GOTU) setting, a strong case of out-of-distribution generalization. This is motivated by the fact that the rich combinatorial nature of data in certain reasoning tasks (e.g., arithmetic/logic) makes representative data sampling challenging, and learning successfully under GOTU gives a first vignette of an ‘extrapolating’ or ‘reasoning’ learner. We study how different network architectures trained by (S)GD perform under GOTU and provide both theoretical and experimental evidence…Apple Machine Learning Research

This paper was accepted at the Self-Supervised Learning – Theory and Practice (SSLTP) Workshop at NeurIPS 2024.
Image-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (IJEPA) offers an attractive alternative to Masked Autoencoder (MAE) for representation learning using the Masked Image Modeling framework. IJEPA drives representations to capture useful semantic information by predicting in latent rather than input space. However, IJEPA relies on carefully designed context and target windows to avoid representational collapse. The encoder modules in IJEPA cannot adaptively modulate the type of…Apple Machine Learning Research

Apple Machine Learning Research

This paper was accepted at the Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP) Workshop at NeurIPS 2024.
The pre-training phase of language models often begins with randomly initialized parameters. With the current trends in scaling models, training their large number of parameters can be extremely slow and costly. In contrast, small language models are less expensive to train, but they often cannot achieve the accuracy of large models. In this paper, we explore an intriguing idea to connect these two different regimes: Can we develop a method to initialize large language models using…Apple Machine Learning Research

This paper was accepted at the Adaptive Foundation Models (AFM) workshop at NeurIPS Workshop 2024.
Follow-up conversations with virtual assistants (VAs) enable a user to seamlessly interact with a VA without the need to repeatedly invoke it using a keyword (after the first query). Therefore, accurate Device-Directed Speech Detection (DDSD) from the follow-up queries is critical for enabling naturalistic user experience. To this end, we explore the notion of Large Language Models (LLMs) and model the first query when making inference about the follow-ups (based on the ASR-decoded text), via…Apple Machine Learning Research

Neural contextual biasing allows speech recognition models to leverage contextually relevant information, leading to improved transcription accuracy. However, the biasing mechanism is typically based on a cross-attention module between the audio and a catalogue of biasing entries, which means computational complexity can pose severe practical limitations on the size of the biasing catalogue and consequently on accuracy improvements. This work proposes an approximation to cross-attention scoring based on vector quantization and enables compute- and memory-efficient use of large biasing…Apple Machine Learning Research

Large pretrained vision-language models like CLIP have shown promising generalization capability, but may struggle in specialized domains (e.g., satellite imagery) or fine-grained classification (e.g., car models) where the visual concepts are unseen or under-represented during pretraining. Prompt learning offers a parameter-efficient finetuning framework that can adapt CLIP to downstream tasks even when limited annotation data are available. In this paper, we improve prompt learning by distilling the textual knowledge from natural language prompts (either human- or LLM-generated) to provide…Apple Machine Learning Research

Many app developers are interested in building on device experiences that integrate increasingly capable large language models (LLMs). Running these models locally on Apple silicon enables developers to leverage the capabilities of the user’s device for cost-effective inference, without sending data to and from third party servers, which also helps protect user privacy. In order to do this, the models must be carefully optimized to effectively utilize the available system resources, because LLMs often have high demands for both memory and processing power.
This technical post details how to…Apple Machine Learning Research