Rahul Suresh

Parnian Afshar, Jenny Yeon, Andriy Levitskyy et al.

We focus on addressing the challenges in responsible beauty product recommendation, particularly when it involves comparing the product's color with a person's skin tone, such as for foundation and concealer products. To make accurate recommendations, it is crucial to infer both the product attributes and the product specific facial features such as skin conditions or tone. However, while many product photos are taken under good light conditions, face photos are taken from a wide range of conditions. The features extracted using the photos from ill-illuminated environment can be highly misleading or even be incompatible to be compared with the product attributes. Hence bad illumination condition can severely degrade quality of the recommendation. We introduce a machine learning framework for illumination assessment which classifies images into having either good or bad illumination condition. We then build an automatic user guidance tool which informs a user holding their camera if their illumination condition is good or bad. This way, the user is provided with rapid feedback and can interactively control how the photo is taken for their recommendation. Only a few studies are dedicated to this problem, mostly due to the lack of dataset that is large, labeled, and diverse both in terms of skin tones and light patterns. Lack of such dataset leads to neglecting skin tone diversity. Therefore, We begin by constructing a diverse synthetic dataset that simulates various skin tones and light patterns in addition to an existing facial image dataset. Next, we train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for illumination assessment that outperforms the existing solutions using the synthetic dataset. Finally, we analyze how the our work improves the shade recommendation for various foundation products.

Siliang Liu, Rahul Suresh, Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi

Accurate attribute extraction is critical for beauty product recommendations and building trust with customers. This remains an open problem, as existing solutions are often unreliable and incomplete. We present a system to extract beauty-specific attributes using end-to-end supervised learning based on beauty product ingredients. A key insight to our system is a novel energy-based implicit model architecture. We show that this implicit model architecture offers significant benefits in terms of accuracy, explainability, robustness, and flexibility. Furthermore, our implicit model can be easily fine-tuned to incorporate additional attributes as they become available, making it more useful in real-world applications. We validate our model on a major e-commerce skincare product catalog dataset and demonstrate its effectiveness. Finally, we showcase how ingredient-based attribute extraction contributes to enhancing the explainability of beauty recommendations.

Hui Pang, Sunil Hadap, Violetta Shevchenko et al. · amazon-science

Augmented reality is revolutionizing beauty industry with virtual try-on (VTO) applications, which empowers users to try a wide variety of products using their phones without the hassle of physically putting on real products. A critical technical challenge in foundation VTO applications is the accurate synthesis of foundation-skin tone color blending while maintaining the scalability of the method across diverse product ranges. In this work, we propose a novel method to approximate well-established Kubelka-Munk (KM) theory for faster image synthesis while preserving foundation-skin tone color blending realism. Additionally, we build a scalable end-to-end framework for realistic foundation makeup VTO solely depending on the product information available on e-commerce sites. We validate our method using real-world makeup images, demonstrating that our framework outperforms other techniques.

Wayne Chi, Prachi Kumar, Suri Yaddanapudi et al.

We describe a novel approach for generating music using a self-correcting, non-chronological, autoregressive model. We represent music as a sequence of edit events, each of which denotes either the addition or removal of a note---even a note previously generated by the model. During inference, we generate one edit event at a time using direct ancestral sampling. Our approach allows the model to fix previous mistakes such as incorrectly sampled notes and prevent accumulation of errors which autoregressive models are prone to have. Another benefit is a finer, note-by-note control during human and AI collaborative composition. We show through quantitative metrics and human survey evaluation that our approach generates better results than orderless NADE and Gibbs sampling approaches.