Roman Böhringer

Niclas Pokel, Yiming Zhao, Pehuén Moure et al.

Personalizing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for non-normative speech remains challenging because data collection is labor-intensive and model training is technically complex. To address these limitations, we propose Adapt4Me, a web-based decentralized environment that operationalizes Bayesian active learning to enable end-to-end personalization without expert supervision. The app exposes data selection, adaptation, and validation to lay users through a three-stage human-in-the-loop workflow: (1) rapid profiling via greedy phoneme sampling to capture speaker-specific acoustics; (2) backend personalization using Variational Inference Low-Rank Adaptation (VI-LoRA) to enable fast, incremental updates; and (3) continuous improvement, where users guide model refinement by resolving visualized model uncertainty via low-friction top-k corrections. By making epistemic uncertainty explicit, Adapt4Me reframes data efficiency as an interactive design feature rather than a purely algorithmic concern. We show how this enables users to personalize robust ASR models, transforming them from passive data sources into active authors of their own assistive technology.

Nikoli Dryden, Roman Böhringer, Tal Ben-Nun et al.

I/O is emerging as a major bottleneck for machine learning training, especially in distributed environments. Indeed, at large scale, I/O takes as much as 85% of training time. Addressing this I/O bottleneck necessitates careful optimization, as optimal data ingestion pipelines differ between systems, and require a delicate balance between access to local storage, external filesystems, and remote nodes. We introduce NoPFS, a machine learning I/O middleware, which provides a scalable, flexible, and easy-to-use solution to the I/O bottleneck. NoPFS uses clairvoyance: Given the seed generating the random access pattern for training with SGD, it can exactly predict when and where a sample will be accessed. We combine this with an analysis of access patterns and a performance model to provide distributed caching policies that adapt to different datasets and storage hierarchies. NoPFS reduces I/O times and improves end-to-end training by up to 5.4x on the ImageNet-1k, ImageNet-22k, and CosmoFlow datasets.