Facebook is experimenting on a new artificial intelligence technology that may soon be able to help people who want to become more fashionable.
Fashion++ AI
The social media company is working on Fashion++ AI, which uses deep image-generation neural network to suggest how people can improve their outfit by swapping, removing or adding garments, and by offering suggestions such as rolling up sleeves or tucking in a shirt.
Fashion++ uses a discriminative fashionability classifier trained on thousands of images of outfits, through which it learns to judge fashionable outfits.
"Our model consists of a deep image generation neural network that learns to synthesize clothing conditioned on learned per-garment encodings. The latent encodings are explicitly factorized according to shape and texture, thereby allowing direct edits for both fit/presentation and color/patterns/material, respectively," Facebook AI Research (FAIR) scientist Devi Parikh and colleagues wrote.
The system makes small suggestions and does not recommend buying an entirely new outfit, so people do not have to splurge money to look more fashionable. They simply have to tweak an existing outfit by replacing items or making changes on how they wear their garments to improve their looks.
"Whereas previous work in this area has explored ways to recommend an entirely new outfit or to identify garments that are similar to one another, Fashion++ instead aims to suggest subtle alterations to an existing outfit that will make it more stylish," Facebook described the program.
The social media company hopes that the AI may one day help people create new styles, or even help designers come up with new looks.
Facebook And AI
Fashion++ offers a more practical use of AI that can help people who want to improve their appearance through the clothes they wear, but Facebook has also been working on other artificial intelligence systems.
Facebook Research, for instance, worked with MIT researchers to train an AI assistant to multitask with superhuman-like efficiency. They trained the AI assistant inside the popular video game Minecraft.
One of Facebook's AI systems has become so advanced it learned to invent and communicate in a language that humans can't understand. The company shut it down in 2017.
