AI Safety II: Goodharting and Reward Hacking
In this post, the second in the series (after...
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The company’s labeled training data will enable automobile manufacturers to build computer vision systems to meet new driver safety regulatory requirements.
SAN FRANCISCO, July 27, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Synthesis AI, a pioneer in synthetic data technologies, today announced enhanced capabilities to simulate driver behavior in the car cabin environment to ensure Automobile and Autonomous Vehicle (AV) manufacturers have access to high-quality, perfectly labeled training data to build driver safety systems. Through the company’s synthetic data-as-a-service FaceAPI solution, manufacturers can now test intelligent sensing configurations and driver safety monitoring systems across a broader set of environments and solutions without compromising customer privacy.
“For safe and general deployment of automobiles, especially AVs, Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems need to perceive the world reliably and make proper decisions across a wide range of situations,” said Yashar Behzadi, CEO of Synthesis AI. “With recent attention directed to driver monitoring systems to improve road safety, it’s inevitable that the demand for synthetic data and its simulation capabilities will only increase, as the technology is uniquely positioned to accelerate the development of driver safety and autonomous systems.”
Beginning in 2022, all new cars entering the EU market must be equipped with advanced safety systems. Among the mandatory safety measures is distraction recognition and alert systems on trucks and buses to warn when vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians or cyclists, are in close proximity.
To meet the new requirements, automobile companies will be faced with spending vast amounts of resources building and deploying cars to collect diverse datasets to train AI models. However, it is both costly and impractical to capture sufficient examples of diverse sets of drivers across a wide variety of situations. Synthetic data will play an increasingly important role in overcoming these bottlenecks.
Manufacturers will have the ability to mimic driver behavior in virtual car environments to test and iterate their models across a broader set of settings and situations without building and deploying fleets of vehicles. To meet the data demands of the in-cabin driver safety monitoring systems, Synthesis AI’s FaceAPI enables the on-demand generation of thousands of unique identities with granular control of emotion, gaze angle, head pose, accessories, environments, camera systems (e.g., RGB, NIR, TOF), and more. Since the data is generated, the image data comes with an expanded set of pixel-perfect labels, including facial landmarks, gaze, angle, depth maps, segmentation, surface normals, and facial meshes. As a result, automotive manufacturers will be able to build more robust training models in a fraction of the time and cost of traditional human-annotated real-world data approaches.
“The new EU regulations demonstrate the growing expectation for car manufacturers to have a comprehensive understanding of all the human variables that can impact road safety. Synthetic data will play an instrumental role in meeting this need,” said Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, Deputy CEO of Smart Eye, and former Co-Founder and CEO of Affectiva. “Our collaboration with Synthesis AI has allowed us to test our computer vision models with large sets of diverse data that are indicative of real-world use-cases. As a result, we’re able to deliver advanced driver monitoring and Interior Sensing systems that meet the requirements of automakers today and in the future.”
Synthesis AI, which works with automobile and autonomous vehicle manufacturers and tier-1 suppliers, is continually building capability to meet the future demands of manufacturers.
To learn more about the use of synthetic data to improve state-of-the-art facial models, download the white paper, Synthetic Data Case Studies: It Just Works.
About Synthesis AISynthesis AI, a San Francisco-based technology company, is pioneering the use of synthetic data to build more capable computer vision models. Through a proprietary combination of generative neural network and cinematic CGI pipelines, Synthesis’ platform can programmatically create vast amounts of perfectly-labeled image data at orders of magnitude increased speed and reduced cost compared to current approaches.
SOURCE Synthesis AI
The milestone highlights the rapidly emerging role of synthetic data in AI
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, July 13, 2021 – Synthesis AI, a pioneer in synthetic data technologies, today announced their 10 millionth generated labeled image, a testament to the increasing demand for synthetic data to drive new AI models. The company’s first product, FaceAPI, is being leveraged by leading companies to build more capable facial models for smartphone facial verification, teleconferencing, driver monitoring and smart assistants.
Synthesis AI’s unique API approach for synthetic data generation enables customers to create massive amounts of labeled data on-demand. The API empowers machine learning engineers to directly and effortlessly create data with an expanded set of pixel-perfect labels including dense facial landmarks, depth maps, surface normals, gaze, and sub-segmentation masks. As demonstrated by the milestone, Synthesis AI’s scalable cloud infrastructure can support production-level data generation. This announcement signals continued momentum as Synthesis AI recently announced a $4.5M funding round to add to its world-class R&D teams and continue leading the industry in the development of synthetic data technologies. Synthesis AI also recently released 40,000 unique high-resolution 3D facial models.
“Synthetic data solves fundamental cost, efficiency, and accuracy issues with today’s human-labeled data approaches,” said Yashar Behzadi, CEO and founder of Synthesis AI. “Traditionally, obtaining labeled facial images would cost about $3 an image for standard 2D landmarks. Instead, we are now able to produce images with never before labels such as depth maps, surface normals, dense 3D landmarks, gaze vectors, emotion, and more at a fraction of the cost and time. Once ML developers can generate labeled data on-demand through our simple FaceAPI, the ability to iterate and optimize model performance changes by orders of magnitude.”
Synthetic data is a disruptive technology that will democratize access to high-quality training data, allowing companies of all sizes to create best-in-class models. Synthesis AI will be introducing new APIs in the coming months to service broader use-cases and industries.
“This accomplishment is truly a testament to how Synthesis AI is setting the pace for synthetic data technology,” said Rob May, Partner at PJC. “We are excited to be supporting a true trailblazer putting a game-changing technology on the map.”
About Synthesis AI
Synthesis AI, a San Francisco-based technology company, is pioneering the use of synthetic data to build more capable computer vision models. Through a proprietary combination of generative neural network and cinematic CGI pipelines, Synthesis’ platform can programmatically create vast amounts of perfectly-labeled image data at orders of magnitude increased speed and reduced cost compared to current approaches.
The highly diverse computer vision training set reduces bias concerns by spanning genders, BMI, and ethnicities.
SAN FRANCISCO, June 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ —Synthesis AI, a pioneer in synthetic data technologies, today announced they have released 40,000 unique high-resolution 3D facial models. Through the company’s synthetic data-as-a-service FaceAPI solution, users can now programmatically create perfectly labeled image training data spanning 40,000 unique identities. Demonstrating Synthesis AI’s commitment to addressing ethical AI issues related to bias and privacy, this data set not only represents the largest collection of 3D facial models available anywhere, but also is the most diverse, spanning gender, ethnicity, age, and BMI.
“On the heels of our recent funding announcement, we are excited to continue this type of growth and momentum as a company,” said Yashar Behzadi, CEO of Synthesis AI. “Our goal is to address bias and privacy in AI and to democratize access to high-quality data. Making 40,000 unique identities available further strengthens this mission, while also addressing the technical, economic, and ethical issues with current approaches.”
The new capability will allow companies of any size to create high-performing and unbiased facial models with access to more robust data. Early customers include three of the top five handset manufacturers, leading teleconferencing companies, and global technology companies building the next generation of smart assistants.
By bringing together cinematic VFX pipelines and novel generative AI models, Synthesis AI is uniquely able to produce high-quality and diverse 3D models of faces. Each identity can be modified by near-infinite variability through the combination of emotion, head pose, hair, facial hair, accessories, environments, and camera attributes. Each image comes with associated pixel-perfect labels such as segmentation, facial landmarks, depth maps, surface normals, and more. The ability to create large diverse datasets has recently enabled leading handset manufacturers to develop improved facial verification systems that work with user mask wear across environments and camera angles. Companies across industries and use-cases will be able to build more capable and less biased models, further solidifying Synthesis AI as a leader in synthetic data by providing more capabilities than competitors.
“Releasing a data set of this breadth and depth reflects Synthesis AI’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of computer vision,” said Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, Co-Founder and CEO of Affectiva. “Brands have a unique opportunity to address ethical AI issues related to bias and privacy and build better, more capable models. We’re proud to be working with Synthesis AI to pioneer synthetic data technologies that will strengthen and facilitate that trust.”About Synthesis AISynthesis AI, a San Francisco-based technology company, is pioneering the use of synthetic data to build more capable computer vision models. Through a proprietary combination of generative neural network and cinematic CGI pipelines, Synthesis’ platform can programmatically create vast amounts of perfectly-labeled image data at orders of magnitude increased speed and reduced cost compared to current approaches.
Start-up exits stealth mode to address market need for high-quality machine learning training data with launch of FaceAPI, its synthetic data-as-a-service product
San Francisco, CA, April 7, 2021 – Synthesis AI, a pioneer in synthetic data technologies, today announced $4.5 million in additional funding as they launch a synthetic data-as-a-service FaceAPI product. The round was backed by existing investors Bee Partners, PJC, iRobot Ventures, Swift Ventures, Boom Capital, Kubera VC and Leta Capital. Synthesis AI comes out of stealth mode to provide their unique approach to data generation for computer vision to a wider range of organizations and applications. The new capital will allow Synthesis AI to add to its world-class R&D teams and continue leading the industry in the development of synthetic data technologies.
With recent advances in deep learning, there are tremendous opportunities for companies to develop new and more capable AI-driven computer vision applications. However, traditional data collection and human dataset labeling approaches cannot keep pace, and enterprise companies are lacking access to high-quality and diverse machine learning training data.
“Synthesis AI is laying the foundation to own the synthetic data category. The company is approaching data as a verb, leading to synthetic full body simulations with increasing animations, movements and behaviors interacting in diverse environments that apply across industry domains,” said Kira Noodleman, Principal at Bee and Board Observer for Synthesis AI. “Essentially, this opportunity is unbounded with an incredibly experienced founder at the helm.”
Through a proprietary solution, Synthesis AI’s platform is addressing industry needs by letting customers programmatically create vast amounts of perfectly-labeled, unbiased image data enabling the development of more capable models.
“The synthetic data market is exploding as companies look for better and faster ways to expand their data sets and improve the performance of their machine learning models,” said Rob May, Partner at PCJ. “When we researched the space, the Synthesis AI team seemed far ahead of everyone else in the enterprise market, which is why we are so excited to be part of this round.”
IMMEDIATE PRODUCT MOMENTUM
In addition to securing new funds, Synthesis AI is also launching their FaceAPI product, enabling the on-demand generation of millions of perfectly labeled human images to train more capable computer vision models. FaceAPI, which is now generally available and currently in use by major technology and handset manufacturers, will enable users to prototype, develop and test systems 100 times faster and cheaper than current approaches, while addressing ethical and privacy concerns often associated with facial computer vision. FaceAPI represents the first of many APIs to address various computer vision use-cases.
“We are excited to show this type of growth and momentum. Computer vision is set to explode but companies are currently gated by access to high-quality, diverse image data,” said Yashar Behzadi, CEO of Synthesis AI. “From smartphones to teleconferencing, most devices in our daily routines rely on computer vision, but developing these models is arduous, expensive, and inefficient. Current approaches for human-centered data also face ethical issues related to the breach of consumer privacy and model bias related to gender & ethnicity. We pride ourselves on offering an ever-growing suite of enterprise grade on-demand image and label generation APIs to address the technical, economic and ethical issues with current approaches. ”
Synthesis AI’s technology also scales in the cloud, from research and development phases with small amounts of data to production requirements of terabytes of data.
“Synthetic data has become a critical component to advancing deep learning and is truly changing the state of the art in AI-based applications,” said Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, Co-Founder and CEO of Affectiva. “Our collaboration with Synthesis AI has been extremely rewarding and sparked innovation for how we train our deep learning models, ultimately reducing error rates and cost.”
To learn more about Synthesis AI, visit https://synthesisaistg.wpengine.com/.
About Synthesis AI
Synthesis AI, a San Francisco-based technology company, is pioneering the use of synthetic data to build more capable computer vision models. Through a proprietary combination of generative neural network and cinematic CGI pipelines, Synthesis’ platform can programmatically create vast amounts of perfectly-labeled image data at orders of magnitude increased speed and reduced cost compared to current approaches.
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