Facebook AI Research
abhshkdz at fb dot com
News
- [Nov 20] The Open Catalyst Project was covered by Fortune, Engadget, CNBC, VentureBeat.
- [Nov 20] Organizing the 4th Visually-Grounded Interaction & Language Workshop at NAACL.
- [July 20] Presenting Probing Emergent Semantics in Predictive Agents at ICML 2020 (Video).
- [Mar 20] I completed my PhD!
- [Nov 19] Organizing the Visual Question Answering and Dialog workshop at CVPR 2020.
- [Sep 19] Organizing the Visually-Grounded Interaction & Language Workshop at NeurIPS.
- [Jun 19] Presenting Targeted Multi-Agent Communication as an oral at ICML 2019 (Video).
- [Mar 19] Co-founded Caliper. Caliper helps recruiters evaluate practical AI skills.
- [Feb 19] My work was featured in this wonderful article by Georgia Tech.
- [Jan 19] Awarded the Facebook Graduate Fellowship.
- [Jan 19] Awarded the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship (declined).
- [Jan 19] Awarded the NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship (declined).
- [Jan 19] Organizing the 2nd Visual Dialog Challenge.
- [Oct 18] Presenting Neural Modular Control for Embodied QA at CoRL 2018 (Video).
- [Sep 18] Presenting results and analysis of the 1st Visual Dialog Challenge at ECCV 2018.
- [Jul 18] Presenting a tutorial on Connecting Language and Vision to Actions at ACL 2018.
- [Jun 18] Organizing the 1st Visual Dialog Challenge.
- [Jun 18] Presenting Embodied Question Answering as an oral at CVPR 2018 (Video).
- [Jun 18] Organizing the VQA Challenge and Visual Dialog Workshop at CVPR 2018.
- [Mar 18] Speaking on Embodied Question Answering at NVIDIA GTC (Video).
- [Dec 17] Awarded the Adobe Research Fellowship. (Department’s news story)
- [Dec 17] Awarded the Snap Inc. Research Fellowship. (Department’s news story)
- [Oct 17] Presenting Cooperative Visual Dialog Agents as an oral at ICCV 2017 (Video).
- [Jul 17] Presenting Visual Dialog at the VQA Challenge Workshop, CVPR 2017 (Video).
- [Jul 17] Presenting our paper on Visual Dialog as a spotlight at CVPR 2017 (Video).
Bio
I am a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). Previously, I was a Computer Science PhD student at Georgia Tech, advised by Dhruv Batra, and working closely with Devi Parikh.
My research focuses on deep learning and its applications in climate change, and in building agents that can see (computer vision), think (reasoning/interpretability), talk (language modeling), and act (reinforcement learning). My CV is available here.
2011 - 2015
Summer 2015
2015 - 2016
2017 - 2020
S2017, W2018, S2018
Winter 2019
Summer 2019
Present
During my PhD, I’ve spent three wonderful semesters as an intern at Facebook AI Research — Summer 2017 and Spring 2018 at Menlo Park, working with Georgia Gkioxari, Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra on training embodied agents for navigation and question-answering in simulated environments (see embodiedqa.org), and Summer 2018 at Montréal, working with Mike Rabbat and Joelle Pineau on communication protocols in large-scale multi-agent reinforcement learning.
In 2019, I was fortunate to get the opportunity to spend time at DeepMind in London working on grounded language learning with Felix Hill, Laura Rimell, and Stephen Clark, and at Tesla Autopilot in Palo Alto working on differentiable neural architecture search with Andrej Karpathy.
My PhD research was supported by fellowships from Facebook, Adobe, and Snap.
Prior to joining grad school, I worked on neural coding in zebrafish tectum as an intern under Prof. Geoffrey Goodhill and Lilach Avitan at the Goodhill Lab, Queensland Brain Institute.
I graduated from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee in 2015. During my undergrad years, I’ve been selected twice for Google Summer of Code (2013 and 2014), won several hackathons and security contests (Yahoo! HackU!, Microsoft Code.Fun.Do., Deloitte CCTC 2013 and 2014), and been an active member of SDSLabs.
On the side, I maintain aideadlin.es (countdowns to a bunch of CV/NLP/ML/AI conference deadlines) and aipaygrad.es (statistics of industry job offers in AI). Previously, I’d built neural-vqa and its extension neural-vqa-attention, HackFlowy, graf, Erdős, etc. I often tweet and post pictures from my travels on Instagram and Tumblr.
Blog posts from a previous life.
Publications
The Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) Dataset and Community Challenges
Paper
Code
opencatalystproject.org
An Introduction to Electrocatalyst Design using Machine Learning for Renewable Energy Storage
Auxiliary Tasks Speed Up Learning PointGoal Navigation
Large-scale Pretraining for Visual Dialog: A Simple State-of-the-Art Baseline
Probing Emergent Semantics in Predictive Agents via Question Answering
ICML 2020
Paper
Presentation video
Slides
Feel The Music: Automatically Generating A Dance For An Input Song
IR-VIC: Unsupervised Discovery of Sub-goals for Transfer in RL
IJCAI-PRICAI 2020, ICLR 2019 Task-Agnostic RL Workshop
Paper
Improving Generative Visual Dialog by Answering Diverse Questions
TarMAC: Targeted Multi-Agent Communication
Embodied Question Answering in Photorealistic Environments with Point Clouds
CVPR 2019 (Oral)
Paper
Audio-Visual Scene-Aware Dialog
CVPR 2019
Paper
Code
video-dialog.com
End-to-end Audio Visual Scene-Aware Dialog Using Multimodal Attention-based Video Features
ICASSP 2019
Paper
video-dialog.com
Neural Modular Control for Embodied Question Answering
CoRL 2018 (Spotlight)
Paper
embodiedqa.org
Presentation video
Slides
Embodied Question Answering
CVPR 2018 (Oral)
Paper
embodiedqa.org
Code
Presentation video
Slides
Evaluating Visual Conversational Agents via Cooperative Human-AI Games
Learning Cooperative Visual Dialog Agents with Deep Reinforcement Learning
ICCV 2017 (Oral)
Paper
Code
Presentation video
Slides
Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization
IJCV 2019, ICCV 2017, NIPS 2016 Interpretable ML for Complex Systems Workshop
Paper
Code
Demo
Visual Dialog
PAMI 2018, CVPR 2017 (Spotlight)
Paper
Code
visualdialog.org
AMT chat interface
Demo
Presentation video
Slides
Human Attention in Visual Question Answering: Do Humans and Deep Networks Look at the Same Regions?
CVIU 2017, EMNLP 2016, ICML 2016 Workshop on Visualization for Deep Learning
Paper
Project+Dataset
neural-vqa-attention
Talks
Side projects
aipaygrad.es
aipaygrad.es provides statistics of industry job offers in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
All data is anonymous, cross-verified against offer letters and will
hopefully reduce information asymmetry.
aideadlin.es
aideadlin.es is a webpage to keep track of CV/NLP/ML/AI conference deadlines. It's hosted on GitHub, and countdowns are automatically updated via pull requests to the data file in the repo.
neural-vqa-attention
Torch implementation of an attention-based visual question answering model (Yang et al., CVPR16).
The model looks at an image, reads a question, and comes up with an answer to the question and a heatmap of where it looked in the image to answer it.
Some results here.
neural-vqa
neural-vqa is an efficient, GPU-based Torch implementation of the visual question answering model from the NIPS 2015 paper 'Exploring Models and Data for Image Question Answering' by Ren et al.
Erdős
Erdős by SDSLabs is a competitive math learning platform, similar in spirit to Project Euler, albeit more feature-packed (support for holding competitions, has a social layer) and prettier.
graf
graf plots pretty git contribution bar graphs in the terminal.
gem install graf to install.
HackFlowy
Clone of WorkFlowy.com, a beautiful, list-based note-taking website that has a 500-item monthly limit on the free tier :-(. This project is an open-source clone of WorkFlowy. "Make lists. Not war." :-)
AirMaps
AirMaps was a fun hackathon project that lets users navigate through Google Earth with gestures and speech commands using a Kinect sensor. It was the winning entry in Microsoft Code.Fun.Do.
HackView
Another fun hackathon-winning project built during Yahoo! HackU! 2012 that involves webRTC-based P2P video chat, and was faster than any other video chat provider (at the time, before Google launched Hangouts).
8tracks-downloader
Ugly-looking, but super-effective bash script for downloading entire playlists from 8tracks. (Still works as of 10/2016).