Spatial LibriSpeech: An Augmented Dataset for Spatial Audio Learning

We present Spatial LibriSpeech, a spatial audio dataset with over 570 hours of 19-channel audio, first-order ambisonics, and optional distractor noise. Spatial LibriSpeech is designed for machine learning model training, and it includes labels for source position, speaking direction, room acoustics and geometry. Spatial LibriSpeech is generated by augmenting LibriSpeech samples with >220k simulated acoustic conditions across >8k synthetic rooms. To demonstrate the utility of our dataset, we train models on four fundamental spatial audio tasks, resulting in a median absolute error of 6.60° on…Apple Machine Learning Research

The Monge Gap: A Regularizer to Learn All Transport Maps

Optimal transport (OT) theory has been been used in machine learning to study and characterize maps that can push-forward efficiently a probability measure onto another.
Recent works have drawn inspiration from Brenier’s theorem, which states that when the ground cost is the squared-Euclidean distance, the “best” map to morph a continuous measure in into another must be the gradient of a convex function.
To exploit that result, , Makkuva et al. (2020); Korotin et al. (2020) consider maps , where is an input convex neural network (ICNN), as defined by Amos et al. 2017, and fit with SGD using…Apple Machine Learning Research

Private Online Prediction from Experts: Separations and Faster Rates

*= Equal Contributors
Online prediction from experts is a fundamental problem in machine learning and several works have studied this problem under privacy constraints. We propose and analyze new algorithms for this problem that improve over the regret bounds of the best existing algorithms for non-adaptive adversaries. For approximate differential privacy, our algorithms achieve regret bounds of for the stochastic setting and for oblivious adversaries (where is the number of experts). For pure DP, our algorithms are the first to obtain sub-linear regret for oblivious adversaries in the…Apple Machine Learning Research

Stabilizing Transformer Training by Preventing Attention Entropy Collapse

m*= Equal Contributors
Training stability is of great importance to Transformers. In this work, we investigate the training dynamics of Transformers by examining the evolution of the attention layers. In particular, we track the attention entropy for each attention head during the course of training, which is a proxy for model sharpness. We identify a common pattern across different architectures and tasks, where low attention entropy is accompanied by high training instability, which can take the form of oscillating loss or divergence. We denote the pathologically low attention entropy…Apple Machine Learning Research

Cross-lingual Knowledge Transfer and Iterative Pseudo-labeling for Low-Resource Speech Recognition with Transducers

Voice technology has become ubiquitous recently. However, the accuracy, and hence experience, in different languages varies significantly, which makes the technology not equally inclusive. The availability of data for different languages is one of the key factors affecting accuracy, especially in training of all-neural end-to-end automatic speech recognition systems.
Cross-lingual knowledge transfer and iterative pseudo-labeling are two techniques that have been shown to be successful for improving the accuracy of ASR systems, in particular for low-resource languages, like Ukrainian.
Our…Apple Machine Learning Research

Symphony: Composing Interactive Interfaces for Machine Learning

Interfaces for machine learning (ML), information and visualizations about models or data, can help practitioners build robust and responsible ML systems. Despite their benefits, recent studies of ML teams and our interviews with practitioners (n=9) showed that ML interfaces have limited adoption in practice. While existing ML interfaces are effective for specific tasks, they are not designed to be reused, explored, and shared by multiple stakeholders in cross-functional teams. To enable analysis and communication between different ML practitioners, we designed and implemented Symphony, a…Apple Machine Learning Research

RoomDreamer: Text-Driven 3D Indoor Scene Synthesis with Coherent Geometry and Texture

The techniques for 3D indoor scene capturing are widely used, but the meshes produced leave much to be desired. In this paper, we propose “RoomDreamer”, which leverages powerful natural language to synthesize a new room with a different style. Unlike existing image synthesis methods, our work addresses the challenge of synthesizing both geometry and texture aligned to the input scene structure and prompt simultaneously. The key insight is that a scene should be treated as a whole, taking into account both scene texture and geometry. The proposed framework consists of two significant…Apple Machine Learning Research

Approximate Nearest Neighbor Phrase Mining for Contextual Speech Recognition

This paper presents an extension to train end-to-end Context-Aware Transformer Transducer ( CATT ) models by using a simple, yet efficient method of mining hard negative phrases from the latent space of the context encoder. During training, given a reference query, we mine a number of similar phrases using approximate nearest neighbour search. These sampled phrases are then used as negative examples in the context list alongside random and ground truth contextual information. By including approximate nearest neighbour phrases (ANN-P) in the context list, we encourage the learned representation…Apple Machine Learning Research

Near-Optimal Algorithms for Private Online Optimization in the Realizable Regime

*=Equal Contributors
We consider online learning problems in the realizable setting, where there is a zero-loss solution, and propose new Differentially Private (DP) algorithms that obtain near-optimal regret bounds. For the problem of online prediction from experts, we design new algorithms that obtain near-optimal regret where is the number of experts. This significantly improves over the best existing regret bounds for the DP non-realizable setting which are . We also develop an adaptive algorithm for the small-loss setting with regret where is the total loss of the best expert…Apple Machine Learning Research

Semi-Supervised and Long-Tailed Object Detection with CascadeMatch

This paper focuses on long-tailed object detection in the semi-supervised learning setting, which poses realistic challenges, but has rarely been studied in the literature. We propose a novel pseudo-labeling-based detector called CascadeMatch. Our detector features a cascade network architecture, which has multi-stage detection heads with progressive confidence thresholds. To avoid manually tuning the thresholds, we design a new adaptive pseudo-label mining mechanism to automatically identify suitable values from data. To mitigate confirmation bias, where a model is negatively reinforced by…Apple Machine Learning Research