Facebook

About: Facebook is a company organization based out in Tel Aviv, Israel. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Artificial neural network & Language model. The organization has 7856 authors who have published 10906 publications receiving 570123 citations. The organization is also known as: facebook.com & FB.

Discovering Causal Signals in Images

Abstract: This paper establishes the existence of observable footprints that reveal the causal dispositions of the object categories appearing in collections of images. We achieve this goal in two steps. First, we take a learning approach to observational causal discovery, and build a classifier that achieves state-of-the-art performance on finding the causal direction between pairs of random variables, given samples from their joint distribution. Second, we use our causal direction classifier to effectively distinguish between features of objects and features of their contexts in collections of static images. Our experiments demonstrate the existence of a relation between the direction of causality and the difference between objects and their contexts, and by the same token, the existence of observable signals that reveal the causal dispositions of objects.

Cloze-driven Pretraining of Self-attention Networks

Abstract: We present a new approach for pretraining a bi-directional transformer model that provides significant performance gains across a variety of language understanding problems. Our model solves a cloze-style word reconstruction task, where each word is ablated and must be predicted given the rest of the text. Experiments demonstrate large performance gains on GLUE and new state of the art results on NER as well as constituency parsing benchmarks, consistent with the concurrently introduced BERT model. We also present a detailed analysis of a number of factors that contribute to effective pretraining, including data domain and size, model capacity, and variations on the cloze objective.

VAIN: Attentional Multi-agent Predictive Modeling

Abstract: Multi-agent predictive modeling is an essential step for understanding physical, social and team-play systems. Recently, Interaction Networks (INs) were proposed for the task of modeling multi-agent physical systems. One of the drawbacks of INs is scaling with the number of interactions in the system (typically quadratic or higher order in the number of agents). In this paper we introduce VAIN, a novel attentional architecture for multi-agent predictive modeling that scales linearly with the number of agents. We show that VAIN is effective for multi-agent predictive modeling. Our method is evaluated on tasks from challenging multi-agent prediction domains: chess and soccer, and outperforms competing multi-agent approaches.

ACUTE-EVAL: Improved Dialogue Evaluation with Optimized Questions and Multi-turn Comparisons.

Abstract: While dialogue remains an important end-goal of natural language research, the difficulty of evaluation is an oft-quoted reason why it remains troublesome to make real progress towards its solution. Evaluation difficulties are actually two-fold: not only do automatic metrics not correlate well with human judgments, but also human judgments themselves are in fact difficult to measure. The two most used human judgment tests, single-turn pairwise evaluation and multi-turn Likert scores, both have serious flaws as we discuss in this work. We instead provide a novel procedure involving comparing two full dialogues, where a human judge is asked to pay attention to only one speaker within each, and make a pairwise judgment. The questions themselves are optimized to maximize the robustness of judgments across different annotators, resulting in better tests. We also show how these tests work in self-play model chat setups, resulting in faster, cheaper tests. We hope these tests become the de facto standard, and will release open-source code to that end.

Facebook's data center network architecture

Abstract: We review Facebook's current data center network architecture and explore some alternative architectures.