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.

CopyCatch: stopping group attacks by spotting lockstep behavior in social networks

Abstract: How can web services that depend on user generated content discern fraudulent input by spammers from legitimate input? In this paper we focus on the social network Facebook and the problem of discerning ill-gotten Page Likes, made by spammers hoping to turn a profit, from legitimate Page Likes. Our method, which we refer to as CopyCatch, detects lockstep Page Like patterns on Facebook by analyzing only the social graph between users and Pages and the times at which the edges in the graph (the Likes) were created. We offer the following contributions: (1) We give a novel problem formulation, with a simple concrete definition of suspicious behavior in terms of graph structure and edge constraints. (2) We offer two algorithms to find such suspicious lockstep behavior - one provably-convergent iterative algorithm and one approximate, scalable MapReduce implementation. (3) We show that our method severely limits "greedy attacks" and analyze the bounds from the application of the Zarankiewicz problem to our setting. Finally, we demonstrate and discuss the effectiveness of CopyCatch at Facebook and on synthetic data, as well as potential extensions to anomaly detection problems in other domains. CopyCatch is actively in use at Facebook, searching for attacks on Facebook's social graph of over a billion users, many millions of Pages, and billions of Page Likes.

Total Capture: A 3D Deformation Model for Tracking Faces, Hands, and Bodies

Abstract: We present a unified deformation model for the markerless capture of human movement at multiple scales, including facial expressions, body motion, and hand gestures. An initial model is generated by locally stitching together models of the individual parts of the human body, which we refer to as "Frank". This model enables the full expression of part movements, including face and hands, by a single seamless model. We capture a dataset of people wearing everyday clothes and optimize the Frank model to create "Adam": a calibrated model that shares the same skeleton hierarchy as the initial model with a simpler parameterization. Finally, we demonstrate the use of these models for total motion tracking in a multiview setup, simultaneously capturing the large-scale body movements and the subtle face and hand motion of a social group of people.

f4: Facebook's warm BLOB storage system

Abstract: Facebook's corpus of photos, videos, and other Binary Large OBjects (BLOBs) that need to be reliably stored and quickly accessible is massive and continues to grow. As the footprint of BLOBs increases, storing them in our traditional storage system, Haystack, is becoming increasingly inefficient. To increase our storage efficiency, measured in the effective-replication-factor of BLOBs, we examine the underlying access patterns of BLOBs and identify temperature zones that include hot BLOBs that are accessed frequently and warm BLOBs that are accessed far less often. Our overall BLOB storage system is designed to isolate warm BLOBs and enable us to use a specialized warm BLOB storage system, f4. f4 is a new system that lowers the effective-replication-factor of warm BLOBs while remaining fault tolerant and able to support the lower throughput demands.f4 currently stores over 65PBs of logical BLOBs and reduces their effective-replication-factor from 3.6 to either 2.8 or 2.1. f4 provides low latency; is resilient to disk, host, rack, and datacenter failures; and provides sufficient throughput for warm BLOBs.

X3D: Expanding Architectures for Efficient Video Recognition

Abstract: This paper presents X3D, a family of efficient video networks that progressively expand a tiny 2D image classification architecture along multiple network axes, in space, time, width and depth. Inspired by feature selection methods in machine learning, a simple stepwise network expansion approach is employed that expands a single axis in each step, such that good accuracy to complexity trade-off is achieved. To expand X3D to a specific target complexity, we perform progressive forward expansion followed by backward contraction. X3D achieves state-of-the-art performance while requiring 4.8x and 5.5x fewer multiply-adds and parameters for similar accuracy as previous work. Our most surprising finding is that networks with high spatiotemporal resolution can perform well, while being extremely light in terms of network width and parameters. We report competitive accuracy at unprecedented efficiency on video classification and detection benchmarks. Code will be available at: this https URL

Regionlets for Generic Object Detection

Abstract: Generic object detection is confronted by dealing with different degrees of variations, caused by viewpoints or deformations in distinct object classes, with tractable computations. This demands for descriptive and flexible object representations which can be efficiently evaluated in many locations. We propose to model an object class with a cascaded boosting classifier which integrates various types of features from competing local regions, each of which may consist of a group of subregions, named as regionlets . A regionlet is a base feature extraction region defined proportionally to a detection window at an arbitrary resolution (i.e., size and aspect ratio). These regionlets are organized in small groups with stable relative positions to be descriptive to delineate fine-grained spatial layouts inside objects. Their features are aggregated into a one-dimensional feature within one group so as to be flexible to tolerate deformations. The most discriminative regionlets for each object class are selected through a boosting learning procedure. Our regionlet approach achieves very competitive performance on popular multi-class detection benchmark datasets with a single method, without any context. It achieves a detection mean average precision of 41.7 percent on the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset, and 39.7 percent on the VOC 2010 for 20 object categories. We further develop support pixel integral images to efficiently augment regionlet features with the responses learned by deep convolutional neural networks. Our regionlet based method won second place in the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Object Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC 2013).