Demonstration of Adapt4Me: An Uncertainty-Aware Authoring Environment for Personalizing Automatic Speech Recognition to Non-normative Speech

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.

Clairvoyant Prefetching for Distributed Machine Learning I/O

I/O is emerging as a major bottleneck for machine learning training, especially in distributed environments such as clouds and supercomputers. Optimal data ingestion pipelines differ between systems, and increasing efficiency requires a delicate balance between access to local storage, external filesystems, and remote workers; yet existing frameworks fail to efficiently utilize such resources. We observe that, given the seed generating the random access pattern for training with SGD, we have clairvoyance and can exactly predict when a given sample will be accessed. We combine this with a theoretical analysis of access patterns in training and performance modeling to produce a novel machine learning I/O middleware, HDMLP, to tackle the I/O bottleneck. HDMLP provides an easy-to-use, flexible, and scalable solution that delivers better performance than state-of-the-art approaches while requiring very few changes to existing codebases and supporting a broad range of environments.