2022: A Year Full of Amazing AI papers- A Review 🚀
A curated list of the latest breakthroughs in AI by release date with a clear video explanation, link to a more in-depth article, and code.
While the world is still recovering, research hasn't slowed its frenetic pace, especially in the field of artificial intelligence. More, many important aspects were highlighted this year, like the ethical aspects, important biases, governance, transparency and much more. Artificial intelligence and our understanding of the human brain and its link to AI are constantly evolving, showing promising applications improving our life's quality in the near future. Still, we ought to be careful with which technology we choose to apply.
"Science cannot tell us what we ought to do, only what we can do."- Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Here's curated list of the latest breakthroughs in AI and Data Science by release date with a clear video explanation, link to a more in-depth article, and code (if applicable). Enjoy the read!
The complete reference to each paper is listed at the end of this repository. Star this repository to stay up to date and stay tuned for next year! ⭐️
Maintainer: louisfb01, also active on YouTube and as a Podcaster if you want to see/hear more about AI!
Subscribe to my newsletter - The latest updates in AI explained every week.
Feel free to message me any interesting paper I may have missed to add to this repository.
Tag me on Twitter @Whats_AI or LinkedIn @Louis (What's AI) Bouchard if you share the list! And come chat with us in our Learn AI Together Discord community!
👀 If you'd like to support my work, you can check to Sponsor this repository or support me on Patreon.
Watch a complete 2022 rewind in 8 minutes
The Full List
Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions [1]
You’ve most certainly experienced this situation once: You take a great picture with your friend, and someone is photobombing behind you, ruining your future Instagram post. Well, that’s no longer an issue. Either it is a person or a trashcan you forgot to remove before taking your selfie that’s ruining your picture. This AI will just automatically remove the undesired object or person in the image and save your post. It’s just like a professional photoshop designer in your pocket, and with a simple click!
This task of removing part of an image and replacing it with what should appear behind has been tackled by many AI researchers for a long time. It is called image inpainting, and it’s extremely challenging...
Stitch it in Time: GAN-Based Facial Editing of Real Videos [2]
You've most certainly seen movies like the recent Captain Marvel or Gemini Man where Samuel L Jackson and Will Smith appeared to look like they were much younger. This requires hundreds if not thousands of hours of work from professionals manually editing the scenes he appeared in.
Instead, you could use a simple AI and do it within a few minutes. Indeed, many techniques allow you to add smiles, make you look younger or older, all automatically using AI-based algorithms. It is called AI-based face manipulations in videos and here's the current state-of-the-art in 2022!
NeROIC: Neural Rendering of Objects from Online Image Collections [3]
Neural Rendering. Neural Rendering is the ability to generate a photorealistic model in space just like this one, from pictures of the object, person, or scene of interest. In this case, you’d have a handful of pictures of this sculpture and ask the machine to understand what the object in these pictures should look like in space. You are basically asking a machine to understand physics and shapes out of images. This is quite easy for us since we only know the real world and depths, but it’s a whole other challenge for a machine that only sees pixels.
It’s great that the generated model looks accurate with realistic shapes, but what about how it blends in the new scene? And what if the lighting conditions vary in the pictures taken and the generated model looks different depending on the angle you look at it? This would automatically seem weird and unrealistic to us. These are the challenges Snapchat and the University of Southern California attacked in this new research.
SpeechPainter: Text-conditioned Speech Inpainting [4]
We’ve seen image inpainting, which aims to remove an undesirable object from a picture. The machine learning-based techniques do not simply remove the objects, but they also understand the picture and fill the missing parts of the image with what the background should look like.
The recent advancements are incredible, just like the results, and this inpainting task can be quite useful for many applications like advertisements or improving your future Instagram post. We also covered an even more challenging task: video inpainting, where the same process is applied to videos to remove objects or people.
The challenge with videos comes with staying consistent from frame to frame without any buggy artifacts. But now, what happens if we correctly remove a person from a movie and the sound is still there, unchanged? Well, we may hear a ghost and ruin all our work.
This is where a task I never covered on my channel comes in: speech inpainting. You heard it right, researchers from Google just published a paper aiming at inpainting speech, and, as we will see, the results are quite impressive. Okay, we might rather hear than see the results, but you get the point. It can correct your grammar, pronunciation or even remove background noise. All things I definitely need to keep working on, or… simply use their new model… Listen to the examples in my video!
Towards real-world blind face restoration with generative facial prior [5]
Do you also have old pictures of yourself or close ones that didn’t age well or that you, or your parents, took before we could produce high-quality images? I do, and I felt like those memories were damaged forever. Boy, was I wrong!
This new and completely free AI model can fix most of your old pictures in a split second. It works well even with very low or high-quality inputs, which is typically quite the challenge.
This week’s paper called Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior tackles the photo restoration task with outstanding results. What’s even cooler is that you can try it yourself and in your preferred way. They have open-sourced their code, created a demo and online applications for you to try right now. If the results you’ve seen above aren’t convincing enough, just watch the video and let me know what you think in the comments, I know it will blow your mind!