Multicore systems should support both speculative and non-speculative parallelism. Speculative parallelism is easy to use and is crucial to scale many challenging applications, while non-speculative parallelism is more efficient and allows parallel irrevocable actions (e.g., parallel I/O). Unfortunately, prior techniques are far from this goal. Hardware transactional memory (HTM) systems support speculative (transactional) and non-speculative (non-transactional) work, but lack coordination mechanisms between the two, and are limited to unordered parallelism.

Most systems that support speculative parallelization, like hardware transactional memory (HTM), do not support nested parallelism. This sacrifices substantial parallelism and precludes composing parallel algorithms. And the few HTMs that do support nested parallelism focus on parallelizing at the coarsest (shallowest) levels, incurring large overheads that squander most of their potential.

Multicore systems must exploit locality to scale, scheduling tasks to minimize data movement. While locality-aware parallelism is well studied in non-speculative systems, it has received little attention in speculative systems (e.g., HTM or TLS), which hinders their scalability.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used in modern AI systems for their superior accuracy but at the cost of high computational complexity. The complexity comes from the need to simultaneously process hundreds of filters and channels in the high-dimensional convolutions, which involve a significant amount of data movement. Although highly-parallel compute paradigms, such as SIMD/SIMT, effectively address the computation requirement to achieve high throughput, energy consumption still remains high as data movement can be more expensive than computation.

We present structured domain randomization (SDR), a variant of domain randomization (DR) that takes into account the structure and context of the scene. In contrast to DR, which places objects and distractors randomly according to a uniform probability distribution, SDR places objects and distractors randomly according to probability distributions that arise from the specific problem at hand. In this manner, SDR-generated imagery enables the neural network to take the context around an object into consideration during detection.

We introduce MegaPose, a method to estimate the 6D pose of novel objects, that is, objects unseen during training. At inference time, the method only assumes knowledge of (i) a region of interest displaying the object in the image and (ii) a CAD model of the observed object. The contributions of this work are threefold. First, we present a 6D pose refiner based on a render & compare strategy which can be applied to novel objects. The shape and coordinate system of the novel object are provided as inputs to the network by rendering multiple synthetic views of the object's CAD model.

We present a new dataset for 6-DoF pose estimation of known objects, with a focus on robotic manipulation research. We propose a set of toy grocery objects, whose physical instantiations are readily available for purchase and are appropriately sized for robotic grasping and manipulation. We provide 3D scanned textured models of these objects, suitable for generating synthetic training data, as well as RGBD images of the objects in challenging, cluttered scenes exhibiting partial occlusion, extreme lighting variations, multiple instances per image, and a large variety of poses.

We propose to explore a new problem called audio-visual segmentation (AVS), in which the goal is to output a pixel-level map of the object(s) that produce sound at the time of the image frame. To facilitate this research, we construct the first audio-visual segmentation benchmark (AVSBench), providing pixel-wise annotations for the sounding objects in audible videos. Two settings are studied with this benchmark: 1) semi-supervised audio-visual segmentation with a single sound source and 2) fully-supervised audio-visual segmentation with multiple sound sources.

Although deep learning-based methods have dominated stereo matching leaderboards by yielding unprecedented disparity accuracy, their inference time is typically slow, on the order of seconds for a pair of 540p images. The main reason is that the leading methods employ time-consuming 3D convolutions applied to a 4D feature volume. A common way to speed up the computation is to downsample the feature volume, but this loses high-frequency details.

We present a large-scale synthetic dataset for novel view synthesis consisting of ~300k images rendered from nearly 2000 complex scenes using high-quality ray tracing at high resolution (1600 x 1600 pixels). The dataset is orders of magnitude larger than existing synthetic datasets for novel view synthesis, thus providing a large unified benchmark for both training and evaluation. Using 4 distinct sources of high-quality 3D meshes, the scenes of our dataset exhibit challenging variations in camera views, lighting, shape, materials, and textures.