Posts in category: Apple

In this work, we present and evaluate SELMA, a Speech-Enabled Language Model for virtual Assistant interactions that integrates audio and text as inputs to a Large Language Model (LLM). SELMA is designed to handle three primary and two auxiliary tasks related to interactions with virtual assistants simultaneously within a single end-to-end model. We employ low-rank adaptation modules for parameter-efficient training of both the audio encoder and the LLM. Additionally, we implement a feature pooling strategy enabling the system to recognize global patterns and improve accuracy on tasks less…Apple Machine Learning Research

Not yet. We present SPACE, a benchmark that systematically evaluates spatial cognition in frontier models. Our benchmark builds on decades of research in cognitive science. It evaluates large-scale mapping abilities that are brought to bear when an organism traverses physical environments, smaller-scale reasoning about object shapes and layouts, and cognitive infrastructure such as spatial attention and memory. For many tasks, we instantiate parallel presentations via text and images, allowing us to benchmark both large language models and large multimodal models. Results suggest that…Apple Machine Learning Research

Residual transformations enhance the representational depth and expressive power of large language models (LLMs). However, applying static residual transformations across all tokens in auto-regressive generation leads to a suboptimal trade-off between inference efficiency and generation fidelity. Existing methods, including Early Exiting, Skip Decoding, and Mixture-of-Depth address this by modulating the residual transformation based on token-level complexity. Nevertheless, these approaches predominantly consider the distance traversed by tokens through the model layers, neglecting the…Apple Machine Learning Research

Synthesizing a novel view from a single input image is a challenging task. Traditionally, this task was approached by estimating scene depth, warping, and inpainting, with machine learning models enabling parts of the pipeline. More recently, generative models are being increasingly employed in novel view synthesis (NVS), often encompassing the entire end-to-end system. In this work, we adapt a modern diffusion model architecture for end-to-end NVS in the pixel space, substantially outperforming previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques. We explore different ways to encode geometric…Apple Machine Learning Research

Large language models have revolutionized natural language processing by leveraging self-supervised pretraining on vast textual data. Inspired by this success, researchers have investigated complicated speech tokenization methods to discretize continuous speech signals so that language modeling techniques can be applied to speech data. However, existing approaches either model semantic (content) tokens, potentially losing acoustic information, or model acoustic tokens, risking the loss of semantic (content) information. Having multiple token types also complicates the architecture and requires…Apple Machine Learning Research

We introduce MIA-Bench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on their ability to strictly adhere to complex instructions. Our benchmark comprises a diverse set of 400 image-prompt pairs, each crafted to challenge the models’ compliance with layered instructions in generating accurate responses that satisfy specific requested patterns. Evaluation results from a wide array of state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal significant variations in performance, highlighting areas for improvement in instruction fidelity. Additionally, we create extra training data and…Apple Machine Learning Research

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated a wide range of capabilities across many domains, including Embodied AI. In this work, we study how to best ground a MLLM into different embodiments and their associated action spaces, with the goal of leveraging the multimodal world knowledge of the MLLM. We first generalize a number of methods through a unified architecture and the lens of action space adaptors. For continuous actions, we show that a learned tokenization allows for sufficient modeling precision, yielding the best performance on downstream tasks. For discrete actions…Apple Machine Learning Research

Modern wearable devices can conveniently record various biosignals in the many different environments of daily living, enabling a rich view of individual health. However, not all biosignals are the same: high-fidelity biosignals, such as photoplethysmogram (PPG), contain more physiological information, but require optical sensors with a high power footprint. Alternatively, a lower-fidelity biosignal such as accelerometry has a significantly smaller power footprint and is available in almost any wearable device. While accelerometry is widely used for activity recognition and fitness, it is less…Apple Machine Learning Research

Foundation models are trained on large-scale web-crawled datasets, which often contain noise, biases, and irrelevant information. This motivates the use of data selection techniques, which can be divided into model-free variants — relying on heuristic rules and downstream datasets — and model-based, e.g., using influence functions. The former can be expensive to design and risk introducing unwanted dependencies, while the latter are often computationally prohibitive. Instead, we propose an efficient, model-based approach using the Mimic Score, a new data quality metric that leverages the…Apple Machine Learning Research

We examine the capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to tackle diverse domains that extend beyond the traditional language and vision tasks these models are typically trained on. Specifically, our focus lies in areas such as Embodied AI, Games, UI Control, and Planning. To this end, we introduce a process of adapting an MLLM to a Generalist Embodied Agent (GEA). GEA is a single unified model capable of grounding itself across these varied domains through a multi-embodiment action tokenizer. GEA is trained with supervised learning on a large dataset of embodied experiences and…Apple Machine Learning Research