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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.

Exploring Data-Efficient 3D Scene Understanding with Contrastive Scene Contexts

Abstract: The rapid progress in 3D scene understanding has come with growing demand for data; however, collecting and annotating 3D scenes (e.g. point clouds) are notoriously hard. For example, the number of scenes (e.g. indoor rooms) that can be accessed and scanned might be limited; even given sufficient data, acquiring 3D labels (e.g. instance masks) requires intensive human labor. In this paper, we explore data-efficient learning for 3D point cloud. As a first step towards this direction, we propose Contrastive Scene Contexts, a 3D pre-training method that makes use of both point-level correspondences and spatial contexts in a scene. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on a suite of benchmarks where training data or labels are scarce. Our study reveals that exhaustive labelling of 3D point clouds might be unnecessary; and remarkably, on ScanNet, even using 0.1% of point labels, we still achieve 89% (instance segmentation) and 96% (semantic segmentation) of the baseline performance that uses full annotations.

Collaborative Hashing

Abstract: Hashing technique has become a promising approach for fast similarity search. Most of existing hashing research pursue the binary codes for the same type of entities by preserving their similarities. In practice, there are many scenarios involving nearest neighbor search on the data given in matrix form, where two different types of, yet naturally associated entities respectively correspond to its two dimensions or views. To fully explore the duality between the two views, we propose a collaborative hashing scheme for the data in matrix form to enable fast search in various applications such as image search using bag of words and recommendation using user-item ratings. By simultaneously preserving both the entity similarities in each view and the interrelationship between views, our collaborative hashing effectively learns the compact binary codes and the explicit hash functions for out-of-sample extension in an alternating optimization way. Extensive evaluations are conducted on three well-known datasets for search inside a single view and search across different views, demonstrating that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with significant accuracy gains ranging from 7.67% to 45.87% relatively.

The Early Phase of Neural Network Training

Abstract: Recent studies have shown that many important aspects of neural network learning take place within the very earliest iterations or epochs of training. For example, sparse, trainable sub-networks emerge (Frankle et al., 2019), gradient descent moves into a small subspace (Gur-Ari et al., 2018), and the network undergoes a critical period (Achille et al., 2019). Here we examine the changes that deep neural networks undergo during this early phase of training. We perform extensive measurements of the network state and its updates during these early iterations of training, and leverage the framework of Frankle et al. (2019) to quantitatively probe the weight distribution and its reliance on various aspects of the dataset. We find that, within this framework, deep networks are not robust to reinitializing with random weights while maintaining signs, and that weight distributions are highly non-independent even after only a few hundred iterations. Despite this, pre-training with blurred inputs or an auxiliary self-supervised task can approximate the changes in supervised networks, suggesting that these changes are label-agnostic, though labels significantly accelerate this process. Together, these results help to elucidate the network changes occurring during this pivotal initial period of learning.

Learning Exploration Policies for Navigation

Abstract: Numerous past works have tackled the problem of task-driven navigation. But, how to effectively explore a new environment to enable a variety of down-stream tasks has received much less attention. In this work, we study how agents can autonomously explore realistic and complex 3D environments without the context of task-rewards. We propose a learning-based approach and investigate different policy architectures, reward functions, and training paradigms. We find that the use of policies with spatial memory that are bootstrapped with imitation learning and finally finetuned with coverage rewards derived purely from on-board sensors can be effective at exploring novel environments. We show that our learned exploration policies can explore better than classical approaches based on geometry alone and generic learning-based exploration techniques. Finally, we also show how such task-agnostic exploration can be used for down-stream tasks. Code and Videos are available at: this https URL.

PyTorch distributed: experiences on accelerating data parallel training

Abstract: This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of the PyTorch distributed data parallel module. Py-Torch is a widely-adopted scientific computing package used in deep learning research and applications. Recent advances in deep learning argue for the value of large datasets and large models, which necessitates the ability to scale out model training to more computational resources. Data parallelism has emerged as a popular solution for distributed training thanks to its straightforward principle and broad applicability. In general, the technique of distributed data parallelism replicates the model on every computational resource to generate gradients independently and then communicates those gradients at each iteration to keep model replicas consistent. Despite the conceptual simplicity of the technique, the subtle dependencies between computation and communication make it non-trivial to optimize the distributed training efficiency. As of v1.5, PyTorch natively provides several techniques to accelerate distributed data parallel, including bucketing gradients, overlapping computation with communication, and skipping gradient synchronization. Evaluations show that, when configured appropriately, the PyTorch distributed data parallel module attains near-linear scalability using 256 GPUs.