Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

https://research.facebook.com/blog/879898285375829/fair-open-sources-deep-l20earning-modules-for-torch/

by darklrd • 12 years ago

389 71 12 years ago

research.facebook.com

UXDork• 12 years ago

Does anyone know what Facebook is using the AI for?

raverbashing4• 12 years ago

Basically everything in FB has one main goal: Ads

Secondary goals might be: Spam detection and extracting info from the graph/pictures, etc

FB identify people from your Social Graph in Pictures, for example

pkfrank• 12 years ago

Also, identifying trends in users engaging in predatory behavior, etc.

WillNotDownvote4• 12 years ago

"Basically everything in FB has one main goal: Ads"

Is this actually true, or a glib answer? Ads certainly don't feel like much of the FB experience, nowhere near the level of Google, or even Twitter. They're negligible, really.

Whereas shaping the feed and identifying people in pics, etc, is central to the FB experience.

amelius2• 12 years ago

The software runs on Nvidia hardware. Not sure if all their servers are fitted with one or more GPU cards...

I think it is more likely that this is just research software.

anantzoid• 12 years ago

To further personalise the user feed.

vonnik3• 12 years ago

This is a recruiting move. Facebook is building its DL team, and to do that, they need to grow the community using their tools.

ghayes• 12 years ago

And yet we should applaud the move. I will always appreciate a company moving proprietary technology into the public sphere.

kylebrown• 12 years ago

Now they just need to release the datasets as well. The datasets are far more important than the algos.

publicfig• 12 years ago

I see no issue with open sourcing tools to recruit developers. Honestly, that's one of the best methods I can think of.

vonnik3• 12 years ago

I'm not against it. It's a great way to recruit devs. Just wanted to point out that they would likely be recruiting from the community.

contingencies• 12 years ago

Paper with proper summary: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7580

ajtulloch2• 12 years ago

This paper describes one part of the fbcunn release (the fast convolution layers implemented via FFT, with the source available at https://github.com/facebook/fbcunn/tree/master/src/cuda/fft). There's a lot more in fbcunn if you want to check it out.

Hydraulix989• 12 years ago

In my experience, the fully connected layers are the bottleneck. The other issue was the alternating compute-heavy convolution and the IO-heavy pooling. I'm curious how this FFT implementation stacks up against cuDNN (what's the speedup like for just the convolutional layers? and then what's the overall speedup like?).

nightski2• 12 years ago

Too bad it is Torch. Working in the lua environment is not enjoyable at all. Every error becomes a long procedure of looking deep into the source of the framework since there is no type information or stack traces to go off whatsoever. You are constantly guessing about the shape of the data or what parameters are supposed to look like.

smhx• 12 years ago

there's clear and well stack-traces at the lua level. there's great debugger (in fblualib, called fb.debugger). there's an inbuilt profiler into LuaJIT. too bad you've had a bad experience.

nightski2• 12 years ago

Thanks I am always willing to give it another shot with more tools.

vonnik3• 12 years ago

try http://deeplearning4j.org/

they just partnered with canonical: http://insights.ubuntu.com/?p=9373

frik• 12 years ago

Wow great. I dreamed of an AI platform based on LuaJIT a few years ago. Torch and FB's deep-learning module sound amazing!

technologia5• 12 years ago

We've been using Torch for a while at work, really appreciate Facebook doing this. Some of us had a hard time adjusting to Lua, but it was well worth it.

chubot• 12 years ago

I'm curious what your team experience was with Lua.

IIRC, Lua is even more liberal than Python in that if you mistype a variable name, it will silently give you 'nil' rather than throwing an exception.

Also, the prototype system is a little wonky. It seems overly flexible and makes you do too much work yourself, which would make it hard on a large team all getting started at once.

If Torch gets popular I wonder if something like TypeScript or Facebook's own Flow would start to make sense.

psykotic• 12 years ago

IIRC, Lua is even more liberal than Python in that if you mistype a variable name, it will silently give you 'nil' rather than throwing an exception.

Like most things in Lua, that is easy to customize. You can just add an __index metamethod to environment tables. There are various 'strict' modules which do just that.

technologia5• 12 years ago

So some of our team were a bit disoriented with the lack of reference counting and for others it was their first foray into functional programming.

Our team first picked up the Little Schemer and then jumped directly to lua.

muser• 12 years ago

Could you provide some steps how you could bring everyone one board? We are still having python/R migration issues.

technologia5• 12 years ago

Most of our people came from a stats background using R or python (more focused on Scipy/numpy than any other package).

A few of us had some experience with Lua before with game programming, so we took it on ourselves to teach the others Scheme (almost like an intro to programming class) and then teach how Lua worked in comparison.

I guess we lucked out because they were able to pick it up quickly after the education on functional programming.

Houshalter2• 12 years ago

Torch is really cool. I wish I could use it more. Sadly it isn't supported on Windows.

technologia5• 12 years ago

Initially we had to use Windows for some client requirements, because of that we used Vagrant+Docker to deploy torch. You might want to try that if you can use VMs.

DannyBee5• 12 years ago

Sadly, this has facebook's new, horrible patent clause.

For those who aren't aware, it says

1. If facebook sues you, and you counterclaim over patents (whether about software or not), you will lose rights under all these patent grants.

So essentially you can't defend yourself.

This is different than the typical apache style patent grant, which instead would say "if you sue me over patents in apache licensed software x, you lose rights to software x" (IE it's limited to software, and limited to the thing you sued over)

2. It terminates if you challenge the validity of any facebook patent in any way. So no shitty software patent busting!

jawns• 12 years ago

Here's a link to the patent clause: https://github.com/facebook/fbcunn/blob/master/PATENTS

DannyBee, I'm having a hard time envisioning what sort of scenario might trigger this, and what the repercussions might be. Any chance you could explain?

j_s• 12 years ago

The most interesting part to me is whether or not such claim is related to the Software - so any patent suit against any software, product or service of Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates terminates patent license to this software... seems like they went for the nuclear defense!

SixSigma• 12 years ago

The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, for anyone that makes any claim ... by ... assertion or other action ... alleging .. that any right in any patent claim of Facebook is invalid or unenforceable.

That sounds pretty chilling considering that could mean that anything any of your employees say about any other Facebook patent could wreck your business, if you choose to use Facebook code from Github.

DannyBee5• 12 years ago

Do you mean the first part, or the validity provision? as a reply points out, it is incredibly broad.

Assuming you mean the first part (the validity provision seems "obviously bad" to me), let's lay out some scenarios:

You make your important software dependent on this software. Congrats, facebook can now sue you with impunity because you can't afford to lose these patents.

Worse, the fact that they have given you a grant does not prevent them from suing you, and the second you counterclaim, you lose. Note also that the grant specifically does not cover "the Software in combination with any software or other technology provided by you or a third party." So if you take this stuff and run it in a pipeline, and facebook has a patent on running it in a pipeline, you don't get that patent and they can still sue you.

(Again, in the apache case, you'd only ever lose the patent grant if you sued facebook over the software in question).

Ignoring direct cases, facebook can also use this as leverage during acquisitions that use their software (Nice software, shame if you were to lose rights to it), etc.

There are potentially an infinite number of ways to use this kind of stuff.

Also note this kind of thing has been looked at in the past. There is an entire discussion here: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/archive-license/200...

from when v2 of apache license was being written, etc.

There are reasons the Apache grant has become pretty much the standard - most people and corporations find it a pretty good balance of various concerns (being able to defend yourself in patent lawsuits, etc).

What Facebook has done is entirely one-sided. It benefits Facebook only, and even then, it generally only helps them in situations where they want to sue people. None of this really helps defensively. If they wanted it for defense, they'd write it differently to cover defensive situations.

frabcus• 12 years ago

How can they claim this text file applies?

There is also a file with the industry-standard name LICENSE (https://github.com/facebook/fbcunn/blob/master/LICENSE), with a standard looking BSD license in it.

Surely somebody using it could claim that was the file that applied, and this other non-standard whimsical "PATENTS" file was irrelevant?

Or can people just bury random licenses deep inside copyrighted works, and expect them to apply?

mcintyre19944• 12 years ago

This does look terrible but I'm not sure about number 2 - can you quote the part of the clause that suggested that?

DannyBee5• 12 years ago

"The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, for anyone that makes any claim (including by filing any lawsuit, assertion or other action) alleging ... (b) that any right in any patent claim of Facebook is invalid or unenforceable."

(the entire rest of the ... is clause (a))

bitL• 12 years ago

Does this apply in continental Europe as well? I doubt so. You can't give away your rights via any form of contract.

jongraehl• 12 years ago

As long as you're doing your training offline and shipping the resulting learned models, I don't see this is a big risk. If you're planning on shipping software that can learn online, then sure, use something else for that, or ask for a better deal from FB.

I wonder what would happen if every company offered patented algorithms under these terms. Still wouldn't stop patent trolls, I'd guess.

swatow• 12 years ago

I understand the concern. For reference, what are the worst patents that Facebook owns? Do they own patents that should not have been granted?

tim333• 12 years ago

As I read it is basically says you can use Facebook's patents unless you turn around and sue them in which case the deal's off. I'm not sure it's that awful - I mean how many companies are planing to use Facebook's patents and then sue them?

DannyBee5• 12 years ago

You should read it again :) It requires no lawsuits to lose patents As written, if you make blog posts saying their patents are crap, you've lost.

(and the other provisions are not defensive, they don't require you sue facebook to lose patents)

bpodgursky• 12 years ago

I appreciate that Facebook open-sources their libraries, but they have an awful habit of dumping source code on Github and then continuing to develop it internally without pushing those changes back out.

For example, Facebook open-sourced Thrift, then proceeded to develop it internally, and recently released out a fork of thrift, not merging anything back into the original tree.

Likewise, they open-sourced Corona a few years ago, their Hadoop fork, and I'm pretty sure that branch has been abandoned too.

So I'm really hesitant to start using any projects out of Facebook unless they develop some processes to actually maintain these projects.

amelius2• 12 years ago

From the article:

We hope that these high-quality code releases will be a catalyst to the research community and we will continue to update them from time to time.

peterhunt• 12 years ago

That was years ago. Things have changed around there: https://github.com/facebook

choppaface2• 12 years ago

Agree that their stewardship has been lacking (especially in comparison to say Apache, Docker, etc), but for research code this is a pretty nice release in terms of the scope of problems solved. For research it's more important to have an implementation of what worked (and what /didn't/) than a polished solution + well-kept community because a lot of the current code will probably get thrown away eventually anyways. The service here is research done rather than software provided.

tdaltonc• 12 years ago

They've done a good job keeping up PlanOut.

https://github.com/facebook/planout

Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

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