Explore the latest in Facebook Research through publications

We propose a novel framework to identify subgoals useful for exploration in sequential decision making tasks under partial observability.

We consider a multi-agent framework for distributed optimization where each agent has access to a local smooth strongly convex function, and the collective goal is to achieve consensus on the parameters that minimize the sum of the agents’ local functions. We propose an algorithm wherein each agent operates asynchronously and independently of the other agents.

Using dependent types in production code is a practical way to eliminate errors. While there are many examples of using dependent Haskell to prove invariants about code, few of these are applied to large scale production systems. Critics claim that dependent types are only useful in toy examples and that they are impractical for use in the real world. This experience report analyzes real world examples where dependent types have enabled us to find and eliminate bugs in production Haskell code.

Continual learning aims to learn new tasks without forgetting previously learned ones. We hypothesize that representations learned to solve each task in a sequence have a shared structure while containing some task-specific properties. We show that shared features are significantly less prone to forgetting and propose a novel hybrid continual learning framework that learns a disjoint representation for task-invariant and task-specific features required to solve a sequence of tasks.

VR telepresence consists of interacting with another human in a virtual space represented by an avatar. Today most avatars are cartoon-like, but soon the technology will allow video-realistic ones. This paper aims in this direction, and presents Modular Codec Avatars (MCA), a method to generate hyper-realistic faces driven by the cameras in the VR headset.

In this work, we help the model to achieve this via a novel cyclical training regimen that forces the model to localize each word in the image after the sentence decoder generates it, and then reconstruct the sentence from the localized image region(s) to match the ground-truth. Our proposed framework only requires learning one extra fully-connected layer (the localizer), a layer that can be removed at test time.

Analysis of hand-hand interactions is a crucial step towards better understanding human behavior. However, most researches in 3D hand pose estimation have focused on the isolated single hand case. Therefore, we firstly propose (1) a large-scale dataset, InterHand2.6M, and (2) a baseline network, InterNet, for 3D interacting hand pose estimation from a single RGB image.

We present a method that infers spatial arrangements and shapes of humans and objects in a globally consistent 3D scene, all from a single image in-the-wild captured in an uncontrolled environment. Notably, our method runs on datasets without any scene- or object-level 3D supervision. Our key insight is that considering humans and objects jointly gives rise to “3D common sense” constraints that can be used to resolve ambiguity.

We introduce a learning-based approach for room navigation using semantic maps. Our proposed architecture learns to predict top-down belief maps of regions that lie beyond the agent’s field of view while modeling architectural and stylistic regularities in houses. First, we train a model to generate amodal semantic top-down maps indicating beliefs of location, size, and shape of rooms by learning the underlying architectural patterns in houses. Next, we use these maps to predict a point that lies in the target room and train a policy to navigate to the point.

Textual cues are essential for everyday tasks like buying groceries and using public transport. To develop this assistive technology, we study the TextVQA task, i.e., reasoning about text in images to answer a question. Existing approaches are limited in their use of spatial relations and rely on fully-connected transformer-based architectures to implicitly learn the spatial structure of a scene. In contrast, we propose a novel spatially aware self-attention layer such that each visual entity only looks at neighboring entities defined by a spatial graph.