Novel-View Acoustic Synthesis From 3D Reconstructed Rooms

We investigate the benefit of combining blind audio recordings with 3D scene information for novel-view acoustic synthesis. Given audio recordings from 2-4 microphones and the 3D geometry and material of a scene containing multiple unknown sound sources, we estimate the sound anywhere in the scene. We identify the main challenges of novel-view acoustic synthesis as sound source localization, separation, and dereverberation. While naively training an end-to-end network fails to produce high-quality results, we show that incorporating room impulse responses (RIRs) derived from 3D reconstructed…Apple Machine Learning Research

ReALM: Reference Resolution as Language Modeling

Reference resolution is an important problem, one that is essential to understand and successfully handle contexts of different kinds. This context includes both previous turns and context that pertains to non-conversational entities, such as entities on the user’s screen or those running in the background. While LLMs have been shown to be extremely powerful for a variety of tasks, their use in reference resolution, particularly for non-conversational entities, remains underutilized. This paper demonstrates how LLMs can be used to create an effective system to resolve references of various…Apple Machine Learning Research

RepCNN: Micro-Sized, Mighty Models for Wakeword Detection

Always-on machine learning models require a very low memory and compute footprint. Their restricted parameter count limits the model’s capacity to learn, and the effectiveness of the usual training algorithms to find the best parameters. Here we show that a small convolutional model can be better trained by first refactoring its computation into a larger redundant multi-branched architecture. Then, for inference, we algebraically re-parameterize the trained model into the single-branched form with fewer parameters for a lower memory footprint and compute cost. Using this technique, we show…Apple Machine Learning Research

AV-CPL: Continuous Pseudo-Labeling for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

*Work done during internship at Apple
Audio-visual speech contains synchronized audio and visual information that provides cross-modal supervision to learn representations for both automatic speech recognition (ASR) and visual speech recognition (VSR). We introduce continuous pseudo-labeling for audio-visual speech recognition (AV-CPL), a semi-supervised method to train an audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) model on a combination of labeled and unlabeled videos with continuously regenerated pseudo-labels. Our models are trained for speech recognition from audio-visual inputs and can…Apple Machine Learning Research

ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilities

Recent large language models (LLMs) advancements sparked a growing research interest in tool assisted LLMs solving real-world challenges, which calls for comprehensive evaluation of tool-use capabilities. While previous works focused on either evaluating over stateless web services (RESTful API), based on a single turn user prompt, or an off-policy dialog trajectory, ToolSandbox includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools, a built-in user simulator supporting on-policy conversational evaluation and a dynamic evaluation strategy for intermediate and final…Apple Machine Learning Research

APE: Active Prompt Engineering – Identifying Informative Few-Shot Examples for LLMs

Prompt engineering is an iterative procedure that often requires extensive manual efforts to formulate suitable instructions for effectively directing large language models (LLMs) in specific tasks. Incorporating few-shot examples is a vital and efficacious approach to provide LLMs with precise and tangible instructions, leading to improved LLM performance. Nonetheless, identifying the most informative demonstrations for LLMs is labor-intensive, frequently entailing sifting through an extensive search space. In this demonstration, we showcase an interactive tool called APE (Active Prompt…Apple Machine Learning Research

ACL Conference 2024

Apple is sponsoring the annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), which takes place in person from August 11 to 16, in Bangkok, Thailand. ACL is a conference in the field of computational linguistics, covering a broad spectrum of diverse research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. Below is the schedule of Apple-sponsored workshops and events at ACL 2024.

Schedule
Stop by the Apple booth in Centara Grand and Bangkok Convention Center, Floor 22, Booth #1, from 9:00 – 17:30 (UTC+7) on August 12, 13 and 14.
Monday…Apple Machine Learning Research

Generating Gender Alternatives in Machine Translation

This paper was accepted at the 5th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing 2024.
Machine translation (MT) systems often translate terms with ambiguous gender (e.g., English term “the nurse”) into the gendered form that is most prevalent in the systems’ training data (e.g., “enfermera”, the Spanish term for a female nurse). This often reflects and perpetuates harmful stereotypes present in society. With MT user interfaces in mind that allow for resolving gender ambiguity in a frictionless manner, we study the problem of generating all grammatically correct gendered translation…Apple Machine Learning Research