Posts in category: Apple

It has recently become feasible to run personal digital assistants on phones and other personal devices. In this paper, we describe a design for a natural language understanding system that runs on-device. In comparison to a server-based assistant, this system is more private, more reliable, faster, more expressive, and more accurate. We describe what led to key choices about architecture and technologies. For example, some approaches in the dialog systems literature are difficult to maintain over time in a deployment setting. We hope that sharing learnings from our practical experiences may…Apple Machine Learning Research

While there exists a large amount of literature on the general challenges and best practices for trustworthy online A/B testing, there are limited studies on sample size estimation, which plays a crucial role in trustworthy and efficient A/B testing that ensures the resulting inference has a sufficient power and type I error control. For example, when the sample size is under-estimated the statistical inference, even with the correct analysis methods, will not be able to detect the true significant improvement leading to misinformed and costly decisions. This paper addresses this fundamental…Apple Machine Learning Research

AB testing aids business operators with their decision making, and is considered the gold standard method for learning from data to improve digital user experiences. However, there is usually a gap between the requirements of practitioners, and the constraints imposed by the statistical hypothesis testing methodologies commonly used for analysis of AB tests. These include the lack of statistical power in multivariate designs with many factors, correlations between these factors, the need of sequential testing for early stopping, and the inability to pool knowledge from past tests. Here, we…Apple Machine Learning Research

We introduce the Data and Network Introspection toolkit DNIKit, an open source Python framework for analyzing machine learning models and datasets. DNIKit contains a collection of algorithms that all operate on intermediate network responses, providing a unique understanding of how the network perceives data throughout the different stages of computation.
With DNIKit, you can:

create a comprehensive dataset analysis report
find dataset samples that are near duplicates of each other
discover rare data samples, annotation errors, or model biases
compress networks by removing highly correlated…Apple Machine Learning Research

Collaborative filtering is the de facto standard for analyzing users’ activities and building recommendation systems for items. In this work we develop Sliced Anti-symmetric Decomposition (SAD), a new model for collaborative filtering based on implicit feedback. In contrast to traditional techniques where a latent representation of users (user vectors) and items (item vectors) are estimated, SAD introduces one additional latent vector to each item, using a novel three-way tensor view of user-item interactions. This new vector ex-tends user-item preferences calculated by standard dot products…Apple Machine Learning Research

Recent works on 3D reconstruction from posed images have demonstrated that direct inference of scene-level 3D geometry without iterative optimization is feasible using a deep neural network, showing remarkable promise and high efficiency. However, the reconstructed geometries, typically represented as a 3D truncated signed distance function (TSDF), are often coarse without fine geometric details. To address this problem, we propose three effective solutions for improving the fidelity of inference-based 3D reconstructions. We first present a resolution-agnostic TSDF supervision strategy to…Apple Machine Learning Research

Neural text-to-speech (TTS) can provide quality close to natural speech if an adequate amount of high-quality speech material is available for training. However, acquiring speech data for TTS training is costly and time-consuming, especially if the goal is to generate different speaking styles. In this work, we show that we can transfer speaking style across speakers and improve the quality of synthetic speech by training a multi-speaker multi-style (MSMS) model with long-form recordings, in addition to regular TTS recordings. In particular, we show that 1) multi-speaker modeling improves the…Apple Machine Learning Research

Apple Machine Learning Research

Apple Machine Learning Research

Dense 3D reconstruction from RGB images traditionally assumes static camera pose estimates. This assumption has endured, even as recent works have increasingly focused on real-time methods for mobile devices. However, the assumption of one pose per image does not hold for online execution: poses from real-time SLAM are dynamic and may be updated following events such as bundle adjustment and loop closure. This has been addressed in the RGB-D setting, by de-integrating past views and re-integrating them with updated poses, but it remains largely untreated in the RGB-only setting. We formalize…Apple Machine Learning Research