Facebook research reveals AI tools for improving online clothes shopping

In May, the same week Facebook announced Shops, a way for businesses to set up online stores for customers across Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, the tech giant detailed the AI and machine learning systems behind its ecommerce experiences. Facebook said its goal is to one day develop an assistant that can serve up product recommendations on the fly, and that can learn preferences by analyzing images of what's in a person's wardrobe while allowing the person to try new items on self-replicas and sell apparel that others can preview. A flurry of Facebook-authored papers accepted to the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2020 suggest the company is on its way to developing the components of this assistant. One paper describes an algorithm that uncovers and quantifies fashion influences from images taken around the world. Another demonstrates an AI model that generates 3D models of people from single images.