A new report details the role of AI in China’s effort to fight the coronavirus. Researchers at Synced, a China-based AI publication, describe how nearly 90 machine learning products have contributed to the country’s pandemic response.

When the chips are down, humans can track critical details without being distracted by irrelevancies. New research helps reinforcement learning models similarly focus on the most important details.

Need a wardrobe upgrade? You could ask the fashion mavens at Netflix’s Queer Eye — or you could use a new neural network. Researchers at Amazon propose Category-based Subspace Attention Network (CSA-Net) to predict and retrieve compatible garments and accessories that complement one another.

Computer vision has been learning how to spot manufacturing flaws. The pandemic is accelerating that education. Companies like Instrumental and Elementary are making AI-powered cameras that automate the spotting of damaged or badly assembled products on factory assembly lines.

Why search for “a cotton dress shirt with button-down collar, breast pockets, barrel cuffs, scooped hem, and tortoise shell buttons in grey” when a photo and the words “that shirt, but grey” will do the trick? A new network understands the image-text combo.

MIT withdrew a popular computer vision dataset after researchers found that it was rife with social bias. Researchers found racist, misogynistic, and demeaning labels among the nearly 80 million pictures in Tiny Images, a collection of 32-by-32 pixel color photos.

The transformer architecture that has shaken up natural language processing may replace recurrent layers in object detection networks. A Facebook team led by Nicolas Carion and Francisco Massa simplified object detection pipelines by using transformers, yielding Detection Transformer (DETR).

Football clubs are turning to computer vision for winning insights. Acronis, a Swiss cloud storage and security company, offers AI services designed to give a boost to some of the world’s top football clubs (soccer teams, to Americans), Wired reported.

A cat rotated by any number of degrees is still a cat. It takes a lot of rotated training images to teach convolutional filters this simple fact. A new filter design has this common-sense knowledge built-in.

In online retailing, the most common customer complaints are slow shipping and inability to try on clothes. Amazon conceived its Prime program to address the first concern. To answer the second, it built a virtual fitting room.

Scientists who study animal behavior spend endless hours observing and taking notes about a creature’s actions and reactions. Computer vision could automate much of that work.

A growing body of literature shows that some steps in AI’s forward march may actually move sideways. A new study questions advances in metric learning.

Facebook uses automated systems to block hate speech, but hateful posts can slip through when seemingly benign words and pictures combine to create a nasty message. The social network is tackling this problem by enhancing AI’s ability to recognize context.

Vendors of face recognition are updating their tech as people don masks to protect against Covid-19. Police are bound to take notice. Companies that provide computer vision systems, including at least one that supplies law enforcement agencies, are training models to recognize obscured faces.

In any training dataset, some classes may have relatively few examples. A new technique can improve a trained model’s performance on such underrepresented classes. Researchers introduced a method that synthesizes extracted features of underrepresented classes.