Estimating dimensional emotions, such as activation, valence and dominance, from acoustic speech signals has been widely explored over the past few years. While accurate estimation of activation and dominance from speech seem to be possible, the same for valence remains challenging. Previous research has shown that the use of lexical information can improve valence estimation performance.
Lexical information can be obtained from pre-trained acoustic models, where the learned representations can improve valence estimation from speech. We investigate the use of pre-trained model representations…Apple Machine Learning Research
Leveraging Entity Representations, Dense-Sparse Hybrids, and Fusion-in-Decoder for Cross-Lingual Question Answering
We describe our two-stage system for the Multilingual Information Access (MIA) 2022 Shared Task on Cross-Lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering. The first stage consists of multilingual passage retrieval with a hybrid dense and sparse retrieval strategy. The second stage consists of a reader which outputs the answer from the top passages returned by the first stage. We show the efficacy of using entity representations, sparse retrieval signals to help dense retrieval, and Fusion-in-Decoder. On the development set, we obtain 43.46 F1 on XOR-TyDi QA and 21.99 F1 on MKQA, for an average F1…Apple Machine Learning Research
Efficient Representation Learning via Adaptive Context Pooling
Self-attention mechanisms model long-range context by using pairwise attention between all input tokens. In doing so, they assume a fixed attention granularity defined by the individual tokens (e.g., text characters or image pixels), which may not be optimal for modeling complex dependencies at higher levels. In this paper, we propose ContextPool to address this problem by adapting the attention granularity for each token. Inspired by the success of ConvNets that are combined with pooling to capture long-range dependencies, we learn to pool neighboring features for each token before computing…Apple Machine Learning Research
Style Equalization: Unsupervised Learning of Controllable Generative Sequence Models
Controllable generative sequence models with the capability to extract and replicate the style of specific examples enable many applications, including narrating audiobooks in different voices, auto-completing and auto-correcting written handwriting, and generating missing training samples for downstream recognition tasks. However, under an unsupervised-style setting, typical training algorithms for controllable sequence generative models suffer from the training-inference mismatch, where the same sample is used as content and style input during training but unpaired samples are given during…Apple Machine Learning Research
Dynamic Memory for Interpretable Sequential Optimisation
Real-world applications of reinforcement learning for recommendation and experimentation faces a practical challenge: the relative reward of different bandit arms can evolve over the lifetime of the learning agent. To deal with these non-stationary cases, the agent must forget some historical knowledge, as it may no longer be relevant to minimise regret. We present a solution to handling non-stationarity that is suitable for deployment at scale, to provide business operators with automated adaptive optimisation. Our solution aims to provide interpretable learning that can be trusted by humans…Apple Machine Learning Research
The Slingshot Mechanism: An Empirical Study of Adaptive Optimizers and the Grokking Phenomenon
The grokking phenomenon as reported by Power et al., refers to a regime where a long period of overfitting is followed by a seemingly sudden transition to perfect generalization. In this paper, we attempt to reveal the underpinnings of Grokking via a series of empirical studies. Specifically, we uncover an optimization anomaly plaguing adaptive optimizers at extremely late stages of training, referred to as the Slingshot Mechanism. A prominent artifact of the Slingshot Mechanism can be measured by the cyclic phase transitions between stable and unstable training regimes, and can be easily…Apple Machine Learning Research
Critical Regularizations for Neural Surface Reconstruction in the Wild
Neural implicit functions have recently shown promising results on surface reconstructions from multiple views. However, current methods still suffer from excessive time complexity and poor robustness when reconstructing unbounded or complex scenes. In this paper, we present RegSDF, which shows that proper point cloud supervisions and geometry regularizations are sufficient to produce high-quality and robust reconstruction results. Specifically, RegSDF takes an additional oriented point cloud as input, and optimizes a signed distance field and a surface light field within a differentiable…Apple Machine Learning Research
Neural Face Video Compression using Multiple Views
Recent advances in deep generative models led to the development of neural face video compression codecs that use an order of magnitude less bandwidth than engineered codecs. These neural codecs reconstruct the current frame by warping a source frame and using a generative model to compensate for imperfections in the warped source frame. Thereby, the warp is encoded and transmitted using a small number of keypoints rather than a dense flow field, which leads to massive savings compared to traditional codecs. However, by relying on a single source frame only, these methods lead to inaccurate…Apple Machine Learning Research