Dec 23, 2024
Sony Presents New AI Research at NeurIPS 2024
Researchers from across Sony debuted new work at the 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024), which took place December 10-15 in Vancouver Canada. NeurIPS is an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers in machine learning, neuroscience, statistics, optimization, computer vision, natural language processing, life sciences, natural sciences, social sciences, and other adjacent fields.
Sony welcomed researchers from all over the world to the Sony exhibition booth for demos, discussion, and a series of technology presentations. In a series of poster sessions and workshops, Sony researchers shared work on a wide range of topics from generative AI to fairness in machine learning that hold promise to support the future of creation.
Curating fair datasets
In an oral presentation, AI Research Scientist Dora Zhao shared insights from Sony AI’s accepted paper, “A Taxonomy of Challenges to Curating Fair Datasets,” which highlights the trade-offs ML researchers and practitioners must make during dataset collection and is a continuation of our team’s deep explorations into these issues. This research also marks an evolution of the work from theory to empirical inquiry, applying methods from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to this issue. Read the full blog post from Sony AI to learn more.
Symmetry discovery: neural isometries
Dr. Thomas Mitchel, Senior Research Scientist at PlayStation, presented a main conference research paper“Neural Isometries: Taming Transformations for Equivariant ML.” Completed in collaboration with MIT, Dr. Mitchel’s research focuses on solving real-world geometric and 3D vision tasks that are full of challenging symmetries. The paper introduces an autoencoder framework called “Neural Isometries” that learns to map observations to a space of latent functions where complex phenomena manifest as simple linear maps. The approach demonstrates a new method for neural symmetry discovery.
EXPO Workshop: exploring new methods for image generation and more
As part of the Sony EXPO Workshop at NeurIPS, Sony AI shared two new methods for image generation: GenWarp and PaGoDA. Each of these research papers present novel approaches for creating realistic images and viewpoints from existing data. Both GenWarp and PaGoDA demonstrate how advancements in generative modeling can help people create high quality visual content faster with greater computational efficiency.
Kazumi Fukada of Sony AI presented GenWarp. Generating novel views of a scene can be challenging, as traditional methods rely on estimated depth maps that are prone to warping and loss of semantic details. Rather than rely on inaccurate depth maps, the GenWarp framework combines generative warping and semantic-preserving techniques to produce alternate perspectives of an image. This approach preserves the scene’s original details while generating believable alternate perspectives. The framework is designed to deal with diverse image types, equipped to generalize complicated, real-world scenes.
Chieh-Hsin Lai shared PaGoDA, another method for efficient high-resolution image generation from Sony AI. PaGoDA proposes a new, cost-efficient training pipeline, using a low-generation diffusion model as a starting point then incrementally increasing the image’s resolution. PaGoDA posits a solution to one of the known limitations of diffusion models: scaling to higher resolutions while maintaining fast generation speeds. This approach posits a smarter way to scale: eliminating the need for retraining large models from scratch while still maintaining the quality of the image.
Learn more about GenWarp and PaGoDA on the Sony AI blog.
At the Sony booth, researcher Aida Rahmattalabi shared an overview of Sony AI’s work in AI ethics, a central focus for the team as the field continues to rapidly evolve. The team is exploring bias mitigation techniques, bias detection, ethical data collection, and more. Learn more about Sony AI’s ethics work here.
In addition to sponsoring NeurIPS 2024, Sony Group participated in the 19th Workshop for Women in Machine Learning (WiML). WiML aims to support and promote women in the field of machine learning.
Sony researchers enjoyed connecting with international researchers in Vancouver at NeurIPS 2024 and look forward to collaborating with the community on new breakthroughs to come.
Learn more about Sony AI’s published papers at NeurIPS 2024 on the Sony AI blog
