Amazon's AI Fashion Designer
Amazon is developing machine-learning systems to find and react to fashion-forward trends. The systems would scan social media-featured items and other images to understand user preference for style and generate similar fashionable clothing for sale. Amazon hopes to expand its current fashion offering using the technology. “This is completely changing the industry”, said Cornell University's Kavita Bala.

Amazon, meanwhile, is making moves to bolster its apparel business, developing its own clothing brands, investing in high-quality photography for products, and launching Prime Wardrobe, which lets customers try on clothes before buying them. Its Echo Look app will even give you feedback on your outfits.

But Amazon appears to be pushing that algorithmic approach even further. For instance, one group of Amazon researchers based in Israel developed machine learning that, by analyzing just a few labels attached to images, can deduce whether a particular look can be considered stylish. The software could conceivably provide fashion feedback or recommendations for adjustments. The work is innovative because computers usually require extensive labeling in order to learn from visual information. But in many real-world situations, such as an image posted to Instagram, there might be just one label.

An Amazon team at Lab126, a research center based in San Francisco, has developed an algorithm that learns about a particular style of fashion from images, and can then generate new items in similar styles from scratch—essentially, a simple AI fashion designer. The approach is crude and hardly ready for Project Runway, but it hints at the possibilities.

This work uses a cutting-edge tool called a generative adversarial network, or GAN. It consists of two deep neural networks operating in tandem to learn efficiently from raw data. The GAN internalizes the properties of a particular style simply by looking at lots of examples, and it can then apply that style to an existing item of clothing. GANs, which were developed by a researcher on the Google Brain team, are a hot topic in machine learning today (see “Innovators Under 35: Ian Goodfellow”).

Both these projects were revealed at the workshop organized by Amazon. The event included mostly academic researchers who are exploring ways for machines to understand fashion trends. The company declined to comment on the projects.

Some at the workshop showed how the techniques being developed to track fashion trends could provide broader insights into human behavior. Bala and her colleagues are using information gleaned from Instagram as a form of anthropological research. “We’re trying to understand how people live their daily lives,” she says. “It really is unprecedented in human history that we have this extent of visual records.”