A Theoretical Framework for Acoustic Neighbor Embeddings

Apple Machine Learning Journal / 4/9/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper “A Theoretical Framework for Acoustic Neighbor Embeddings” proposes a theoretical framework for learning embeddings based on acoustic neighbors.
  • It is published on arXiv (2412.02164) with an associated Apple GitHub repository, suggesting reproducible implementation details.
  • By focusing on “neighbor” structure in the acoustic domain, the approach aims to improve how audio representations capture relevant similarity.
  • The work targets speech and natural language processing use cases that rely on robust acoustic embeddings.
  • The publication and released source code may lower the barrier for researchers and engineers to experiment with neighbor-based acoustic representation learning.
This paper provides a theoretical framework for interpreting acoustic neighbor embeddings, which are representations of the phonetic content of variable-width audio or text in a fixed-dimensional embedding space. A probabilistic interpretation of the distances between embeddings is proposed, based on a general quantitative definition of phonetic similarity between words. This provides us a framework for understanding and applying the embeddings in a principled manner. Theoretical and empirical evidence to support an approximation of uniform cluster-wise isotropy are shown, which allows us to…

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