Researchers create artificial intelligence to 'imagine' unseen objects

A research team at the University of Southern California has developed a new artificial intelligence system that uses human-like abilities to imagine never-before-seen objects. By using systems that extrapolate data, researchers were able to envision an object and change its attributes in a similar process to human imagination. "We were inspired by human visual generalization capabilities to try to simulate human imagination in machines," Yunhao Ge, one of the researchers and a computer science PhD student at USC said in a statement. "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," Ge added.