Computer Vision Inches Toward Common Sense With Facebook’S Latest Research

Machine learning is capable of doing all sorts of things as long as you have the data to teach it how. That’s not always easy, and researchers are always looking for a way to add a bit of “common sense” to AI so you don’t have to show it 500 pictures of a cat before it gets it. Facebook’s newest research takes a big step toward reducing the data bottleneck.

One interesting development Facebook has pursued in particular is what’s called “semi-supervised learning.” Semi-supervised learning, related to “unsupervised” learning, involves figuring out important parts of a data set without any labeled data at all.

Facebook researchers have shown that while it may not be easy, it’s possible and in fact very effective. The DINO system (which stands rather unconvincingly for “DIstillation of knowledge with NO labels”) is capable of learning to find objects of interest in videos of people, animals and objects quite well without any labeled data whatsoever.