Apple Publishes Its First Artificial Intelligence Paper

Earlier this month, Apple made a splash when it told the artificial intelligence research community that the secretive company would start publishing AI papers of its own. Not even a month later, it's already starting to make good on that promise.

Apple has published its very first AI paper on December 22. (The paper was submitted for publication on November 15.) The paper describes a technique for how to improve the training of an algorithm's ability to recognize images using computer-generated images rather than real-world images.

In machine learning research, using synthetic images (like those from a video game) to train neural networks can be more efficient than using real-world images. That's because synthetic image data is already labeled and annotated, while real-world image data requires somebody to exhaustively label everything the computer is seeing -- that's a tree, a dog, a bike. But the synthetic image approach can be problematic as what the algorithm learns doesn't always carry over neatly to real world scenes. The synthetic image data "is often not realistic enough, leading the network to learn details only present in synthetic images and fail to generalize well on real images," the paper from Apple says.