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.

Interactive facial feature localization

Abstract: We address the problem of interactive facial feature localization from a single image. Our goal is to obtain an accurate segmentation of facial features on high-resolution images under a variety of pose, expression, and lighting conditions. Although there has been significant work in facial feature localization, we are addressing a new application area, namely to facilitate intelligent high-quality editing of portraits, that brings requirements not met by existing methods. We propose an improvement to the Active Shape Model that allows for greater independence among the facial components and improves on the appearance fitting step by introducing a Viterbi optimization process that operates along the facial contours. Despite the improvements, we do not expect perfect results in all cases. We therefore introduce an interaction model whereby a user can efficiently guide the algorithm towards a precise solution. We introduce the Helen Facial Feature Dataset consisting of annotated portrait images gathered from Flickr that are more diverse and challenging than currently existing datasets. We present experiments that compare our automatic method to published results, and also a quantitative evaluation of the effectiveness of our interactive method.

Social network activity and social well-being

Abstract: Previous research has shown a relationship between use of social networking sites and feelings of social capital. However, most studies have relied on self-reports by college students. The goals of the current study are to (1) validate the common self-report scale using empirical data from Facebook, (2) test whether previous findings generalize to older and international populations, and (3) delve into the specific activities linked to feelings of social capital and loneliness. In particular, we investigate the role of directed interaction between pairs---such as wall posts, comments, and "likes" --- and consumption of friends' content, including status updates, photos, and friends' conversations with other friends. We find that directed communication is associated with greater feelings of bonding social capital and lower loneliness, but has only a modest relationship with bridging social capital, which is primarily related to overall friend network size. Surprisingly, users who consume greater levels of content report reduced bridging and bonding social capital and increased loneliness. Implications for designs to support well-being are discussed.

Understanding Back-Translation at Scale.

Abstract: An effective method to improve neural machine translation with monolingual data is to augment the parallel training corpus with back-translations of target language sentences This work broadens the understanding of back-translation and investigates a number of methods to generate synthetic source sentences We find that in all but resource poor settings back-translations obtained via sampling or noised beam outputs are most effective Our analysis shows that sampling or noisy synthetic data gives a much stronger training signal than data generated by beam or greedy search We also compare how synthetic data compares to genuine bitext and study various domain effects Finally, we scale to hundreds of millions of monolingual sentences and achieve a new state of the art of 35 BLEU on the WMT’14 English-German test set

Hive - a petabyte scale data warehouse using Hadoop

Abstract: The size of data sets being collected and analyzed in the industry for business intelligence is growing rapidly, making traditional warehousing solutions prohibitively expensive. Hadoop [1] is a popular open-source map-reduce implementation which is being used in companies like Yahoo, Facebook etc. to store and process extremely large data sets on commodity hardware. However, the map-reduce programming model is very low level and requires developers to write custom programs which are hard to maintain and reuse. In this paper, we present Hive, an open-source data warehousing solution built on top of Hadoop. Hive supports queries expressed in a SQL-like declarative language - HiveQL, which are compiled into map-reduce jobs that are executed using Hadoop. In addition, HiveQL enables users to plug in custom map-reduce scripts into queries. The language includes a type system with support for tables containing primitive types, collections like arrays and maps, and nested compositions of the same. The underlying IO libraries can be extended to query data in custom formats. Hive also includes a system catalog - Metastore - that contains schemas and statistics, which are useful in data exploration, query optimization and query compilation. In Facebook, the Hive warehouse contains tens of thousands of tables and stores over 700TB of data and is being used extensively for both reporting and ad-hoc analyses by more than 200 users per month.

An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers

Abstract: This paper does not describe a novel method Instead, it studies a straightforward, incremental, yet must-know baseline given the recent progress in computer vision: self-supervised learning for Vision Transformers (ViT) While the training recipes for standard convolutional networks have been highly mature and robust, the recipes for ViT are yet to be built, especially in the self-supervised scenarios where training becomes more challenging In this work, we go back to basics and investigate the effects of several fundamental components for training self-supervised ViT We observe that instability is a major issue that degrades accuracy, and it can be hidden by apparently good results We reveal that these results are indeed partial failure, and they can be improved when training is made more stable We benchmark ViT results in MoCo v3 and several other self-supervised frameworks, with ablations in various aspects We discuss the currently positive evidence as well as challenges and open questions We hope that this work will provide useful data points and experience for future research