Facebook

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

Blockwise Self-Attention for Long Document Understanding

Abstract: We present BlockBERT, a lightweight and efficient BERT model for better modeling long-distance dependencies. Our model extends BERT by introducing sparse block structures into the attention matrix to reduce both memory consumption and training/inference time, which also enables attention heads to capture either short- or long-range contextual information. We conduct experiments on language model pre-training and several benchmark question answering datasets with various paragraph lengths. BlockBERT uses 18.7-36.1% less memory and 12.0-25.1% less time to learn the model. During testing, BlockBERT saves 27.8% inference time, while having comparable and sometimes better prediction accuracy, compared to an advanced BERT-based model, RoBERTa.

Results of the 2020 fastMRI Challenge for Machine Learning MR Image Reconstruction

Abstract: Accelerating MRI scans is one of the principal outstanding problems in the MRI research community. Towards this goal, we hosted the second fastMRI competition targeted towards reconstructing MR images with subsampled k-space data. We provided participants with data from 7,299 clinical brain scans (de-identified via a HIPAA-compliant procedure by NYU Langone Health), holding back the fully-sampled data from 894 of these scans for challenge evaluation purposes. In contrast to the 2019 challenge, we focused our radiologist evaluations on pathological assessment in brain images. We also debuted a new Transfer track that required participants to submit models evaluated on MRI scanners from outside the training set. We received 19 submissions from eight different groups. Results showed one team scoring best in both SSIM scores and qualitative radiologist evaluations. We also performed analysis on alternative metrics to mitigate the effects of background noise and collected feedback from the participants to inform future challenges. Lastly, we identify common failure modes across the submissions, highlighting areas of need for future research in the MRI reconstruction community.

Certified Data Removal from Machine Learning Models

Abstract: Good data stewardship requires removal of data at the request of the data's owner. This raises the question if and how a trained machine-learning model, which implicitly stores information about its training data, should be affected by such a removal request. Is it possible to "remove" data from a machine-learning model? We study this problem by defining certified removal: a very strong theoretical guarantee that a model from which data is removed cannot be distinguished from a model that never observed the data to begin with. We develop a certified-removal mechanism for linear classifiers and empirically study learning settings in which this mechanism is practical.

Systems and Methods Wherein a Buyer Purchases Products In a Plurality of Product Categories

Abstract: Systems and methods are provided wherein an indication of a plurality of product categories is received, each product category being associated with a plurality of products. For example, the indication of the plurality of product categories may be received from a buyer. Buyer offer information, including an indication of an offer amount associated with the plurality of product categories, is also received. A subset of the plurality of products is selected for each of the product categories, and an indication of the selected products is provided. The buyer's offer may then be evaluated. If the buyer's offer is accepted, the selected products may be provided to the buyer in exchange for payment of the offer amount.

Politeness Transfer: A Tag and Generate Approach

Abstract: This paper introduces a new task of politeness transfer which involves converting non-polite sentences to polite sentences while preserving the meaning. We also provide a dataset of more than 1.39 instances automatically labeled for politeness to encourage benchmark evaluations on this new task. We design a tag and generate pipeline that identifies stylistic attributes and subsequently generates a sentence in the target style while preserving most of the source content. For politeness as well as five other transfer tasks, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on automatic metrics for content preservation, with a comparable or better performance on style transfer accuracy. Additionally, our model surpasses existing methods on human evaluations for grammaticality, meaning preservation and transfer accuracy across all the six style transfer tasks. The data and code is located at https://github.com/tag-and-generate.