Imagine an orange cat. Now, imagine the same cat, but with coal-black fur. Now, imagine the cat strutting along the Great Wall of China. Doing this, a quick series of neuron activations in your brain will come up with variations of the picture presented, based on your previous knowledge of the world.
In other words, as humans, it’s easy to envision an object with different attributes. But, despite advances in deep neural networks that match or surpass human performance in certain tasks, computers still struggle with the very human skill of “imagination.”
Now, a USC research team has developed an AI that uses human-like capabilities to imagine a never-before-seen object with different attributes. The paper, titled Zero-Shot Synthesis with Group-Supervised Learning, was published in the 2021 International Conference on Learning Representations on May 7.
“We were inspired by human visual generalization capabilities to try to simulate human imagination in machines,” said the study’s lead author Yunhao Ge, a computer science PhD student working under the supervision of Laurent Itti, a computer science professor.
“Humans can separate their learned knowledge by attributes–for instance, shape, pose, position, color–and then recombine them to imagine a new object. Our paper attempts to simulate this process using neural networks.”
The original article was published at Technology Networks.
To support on positive AI technology and applications, Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation (MDI) and Boston Global Forum (BGF) has established Artificial Intelligence World Society Innovation Network (AIWS.net). According to AIWS.net, AI can be an important tool for helping people achieve well-being and happiness, relieve them of resource constraints and arbitrary/inflexible rules and processes. In this effort, Michael Dukakis Institute for Leadership and Innovation (MDI) invites participation and collaboration with think tanks, universities, non-profits, firms, and other entities that share its commitment to the constructive and development of full-scale AI for world society.
