Homomorphic Self-Supervised Learning

This paper was accepted at the workshop “Self-Supervised Learning – Theory and Practice” at NeurIPS 2022.
Many state of the art self-supervised learning approaches fundamentally rely on transformations applied to the input in order to selectively extract task-relevant information. Recently, the field of equivariant deep learning has developed to introduce structure into the feature space of deep neural networks, specifically with respect to such input transformations. In this work, we observe both theoretically and empirically, that through the lens of equivariant representations, many…Apple Machine Learning Research

Continuous Soft Pseudo-Labeling in ASR

This paper was accepted at the workshop “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better: Understanding Deep Learning Through Empirical Falsification”
Continuous pseudo-labeling (PL) algorithms such as slimIPL have recently emerged as a powerful strategy for semi-supervised learning in speech recognition. In contrast with earlier strategies that alternated between training a model and generating pseudo-labels (PLs) with it, here PLs are generated in end-to-end manner as training proceeds, improving training speed and the accuracy of the final model. PL shares a common theme with teacher-student models such…Apple Machine Learning Research

Subspace Recovery from Heterogeneous Data with Non-isotropic Noise

*= Equal Contributions
Recovering linear subspaces from data is a fundamental and important task in statistics and machine learning. Motivated by heterogeneity in Federated Learning settings, we study a basic formulation of this problem: the principal component analysis (PCA), with a focus on dealing with irregular noise. Our data come from users with user contributing data samples from a -dimensional distribution with mean . Our goal is to recover the linear subspace shared by using the data points from all users, where every data point from user is formed by adding an independent…Apple Machine Learning Research

Learning to Break the Loop: Analyzing and Mitigating Repetitions for Neural Text Generation

While large-scale neural language models, such as GPT2 and BART, have achieved impressive results on various text generation tasks, they tend to get stuck in undesirable sentence-level loops with maximization-based decoding algorithms (e.g., greedy search). This phenomenon is counter-intuitive since there are few consecutive sentence-level repetitions in the human corpus (e.g., 0.02% in Wikitext-103). To investigate the underlying reasons for generating consecutive sentence-level repetitions, we study the relationship between the probability of repetitive tokens and their previous repetitions…Apple Machine Learning Research

A Large-Scale Observational Study of the Causal Effects of a Behavioral Health Nudge

This paper was accepted at the workshop “Causality for Real-world Impact” at NeurIPS 2022.
The Apple Watch encourages users to stand throughout the day by delivering a notification onto the users’ wrist if they have been sitting for the first 50 minutes of an hour. This simple behavioral intervention exemplifies the classical definition of nudge as a choice architecture that alters behavior without forbidding options or significantly changing economic incentives. In order to estimate from observational data the causal effect of the notification on the user’s standing probability through-out…Apple Machine Learning Research

Improving Generalization with Physical Equations

This paper was accepted at the workshop “Machine Learning 4 Physical Sciences” at NeurIPS 2022.
Hybrid modelling reduces the misspecification of expert physical models with a machine learning (ML) component learned from data. Similarly to many ML algorithms, hybrid model performance guarantees are limited to the training distribution. To address this limitation, here we introduce a hybrid data augmentation strategy, termed expert augmentation. Based on a probabilistic formalization of hybrid modelling, we demonstrate that expert augmentation improves generalization. We validate the practical…Apple Machine Learning Research

Elastic Weight Consolidation Improves the Robustness of Self-Supervised Learning Methods under Transfer

This paper was accepted at the workshop “Self-Supervised Learning – Theory and Practice” at NeurIPS 2022.
Self-supervised representation learning (SSL) methods provide an effective label-free initial condition for fine-tuning downstream tasks. However, in numerous realistic scenarios, the downstream task might be biased with respect to the target label distribution. This in turn moves the learned fine-tuned model posterior away from the initial (label) bias-free self-supervised model posterior. In this work, we re-interpret SSL fine-tuning under the lens of Bayesian continual learning and…Apple Machine Learning Research

Stable Diffusion with Core ML on Apple Silicon

Today, we are excited to release optimizations to Core ML for Stable Diffusion in macOS 13.1 and iOS 16.2, along with code to get started with deploying to Apple Silicon devices.
Figure 1: Images generated with the prompts, “a high quality photo of an astronaut riding a (horse/dragon) in space” using Stable Diffusion and Core ML + diffusers running on-device on Apple Silicon.}>

Since its public debut in August 2022, Stable Diffusion has been adopted by a vibrant community of artists, developers and hobbyists alike, enabling the creation of unprecedented visual content with as little as a…Apple Machine Learning Research