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Facebook Launches Dynatask to Boost better Usability of Dynabench and customize NLP tasks

Facebook AI Research Dynabench Dynadesk NLP
Image Caption: TechBeacon

Last September, Facebook had unveiled Dynabench, an AI data collection and benchmarking tool that creates complex test datasets by putting humans and models “in the loop.” They are now unveiling ‘Dynatask,’ a new feature that unlocks Dynabench’s full potential for the AI community.

By allowing human annotators to engage organically with NLP models, Dynatask assists researchers in identifying flaws in the models. Dynatask has created a new artificial intelligence model benchmarking system that is more accurate and impartial than previous techniques. Researchers will be able to take advantage of the Dynatask platform’s powerful features and compare models on the dynamic leaderboard. This includes measuring techniques for fairness, robustness, compute, and memory, in addition to accuracy.

Dynabench analyses how easily humans can deceive AI using dynamic adversarial data collection technique, which Facebook says is a stronger determinant of a model’s quality than current benchmarks. Last year, academics from Facebook and the University College London showed evidence that 60 to 70 percent of responses produced by models evaluated on open-domain benchmarks are embedded somewhere in the training sets. 

Meanwhile, in the past few years, the AI community has taken an interest in open-domain question-answering for its practical uses, and more recently, to assess language models’ understanding of factual information. However, a thorough grasp of the types of questions that models can answer remains unresolved. Further, unknown factors regarding the distribution of questions and responses in benchmark corpora make it challenging to interpret the results.

Fortunately, these benchmarks have been quickly saturating in recent years in NLP. Looking through the annals, it took the research community 18 years to attain human-level performance on MNIST and roughly six years to outperform humans on ImageNet. Meanwhile, beating humans on the GLUE language understanding benchmark took almost a year.

Despite these impressive feats, we are still a long way from having robots that can thoroughly comprehend the essence of natural language. 

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When Dynabench was first released, it included four tasks: natural language inference, question answering, sentiment analysis, and hate speech identification. With its recent breakthroughs, the Facebook AI research team has powered the multilingual translation challenge at Workshop on Machine Translations. These attempts to acquire dynamic data resulted in eight articles being published and over 400K raw samples being collected.

Dynabench provided new complex datasets that combine people and models to test NLP models properly. This approach identifies gaps in current models, allowing the next generation of AI models to be trained in the loop. It also assesses how readily people may deceive AI algorithms in a dynamic rather than static setting. Dynatask takes these features a step further. 

The Facebook Dynatask platform’s potential is limitless, thanks to its highly flexible and configurable feature platform. It opens up a whole new universe for task designers. They may simply create annotation interfaces to allow interactions with models hosted on any number or machine learning competition such as Dynabench and can set up their own challenges with no coding skills. This will enable researchers to acquire dynamic adversarial data.

Each task in Dynatask will have one or more owners who will define the task parameters. They will be able to choose the required assessment indicators/metrics from a list of options, including accuracy, robustness, fairness, compute, and memory. According to the Facebook newsroom blog, anyone can upload models to the task’s evaluation cloud, which is set up to compute scores and other metrics on specified data sets. They may be moved into the loop for dynamic data gathering and human-in-the-loop evaluation after uploading the model, calculation, and evaluation. Task owners may also gather data via the dynabench.org web interface or using annotators (such as Mechanical Turk).

Let’s say you wanted to start a Natural Language Inference task but there weren’t any yet.

Step 1: Log into your Dynabench account and go to your profile page to fill out the “Request new task” form.

Step 2: Once approved, you will have a dedicated task page and corresponding admin dashboard that you control, as the task owner.

Step 3: After uploading the model, select the existing datasets you want to use to evaluate models from the dashboard, as well as the metrics you want to use.

Step 4: Finally, propose or request baseline models from the community.

Step 5: Upload fresh contexts to the system and begin collecting data using the task owner interface to gather a new round of dynamic adversarial data, in which annotators are instructed to produce instances that deceive the model.

Step 6: Once you’ve collected enough data and established that training on the data improves the system, you may upload improved models and then put them in the data collecting loop to create even stronger ones.

The same fundamental process was used by the Facebook AI Research team to create various dynamic data sets, such as Adversarial Natural Language Inference. With the tools available to the larger AI community, the team believes that anybody can build data sets with people and models in the loop.

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DeepMind’s AI predicts When and Where it’s going to Rain

deepmind's AI predicts rain

Google’s DeepMind and the University of Exeter have partnered with Med Office to develop a deep learning and artificial intelligence-powered predictive tool named ‘nowcasting system’ that can accurately predict where and when it’s going to rain. 

Broadly used methodologies generate results that forecast rain only above six hours. But nowcasting can predict rain possibilities in the next ninety minutes. Not every meteorological organization can accurately predict the likelihood of heavy rainfall as it is a complicated task. 

The nowcasting system will allow scientists to generate weather forecasts quickly to help many enterprises spread across various sectors to plan their operations effectively. Industries including aviation, water management, agriculture, emergency services, and many others would heavily benefit from this new product of DeepMind. 

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DeepMind mentioned in a blog, “Today’s weather predictions are driven by powerful numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems. By solving physical equations, NWPs provide essential planet-scale predictions several days ahead.”

It also mentioned that NWP systems struggle to generate high-resolution predictions for short lead times under two hours. DeepMind’s nowcasting tackles this challenge by filling the performance gap. Earlier, many deep learning algorithms have been developed for weather prediction, but they only excelled in predicting the intensity and location of rainfall but not its time. 

The head of partnership and product innovation at Med Office, Niall Robinson, said, “One forecast gets precipitation in the right location but at wrong intensity, or another gets the right mix of intensities, but in the wrong place and so on. We went to a lot of effort in this research to assess our algorithm against a wide suite of metrics.” 

DeepMind’s research scientist, Suman Ravuri, said that the practical end-user inputs provided by Med Office pushed the model development in a different way than what they intended to do on their own.

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Hugging Face releases 900 unique Datasets to standardize NLP

Hugging Face releases NLP Dataset

Hugging Face has released the largest hub of ready-to-use datasets for ML models to anchor challenges of NLP. The Dataset contains 900 unique datasets, more than 25 metrics and has more than 300 contributors. This library will support many novel cross-data research projects to standardize end-user interface and provide a lightweight frontend for internet-scale corpora.

When considering NLP use cases, Datasets play a crucial role in evaluating and benchmarking results. While supervised datasets help in fine-tuning models, large unsupervised datasets assist in pertaining and language modelling. A practitioner faces several challenges when dealing with different versions and documentation of Datasets, the primary cause being the lack of uniformity.

To put an end to this, Hugging Face designed a Dataset that not only addresses the associated challenges of Dataset management but also provides access to support community culture. As this Dataset is developed by community contribution, it inherently got the bootstrapping takeaway that consisted of a variety of languages, including — continuous data types, multi-dimensional arrays for images, audios, and videos.

The primary intent of Hugging Face while creating Dataset from public hackathon are:

  • Each Dataset in the library has a standard tabular format, that facilitates proper version and citation. It needs just one line of code to download all the datasets.
  • As large datasets are computation and memory efficient, Hugging Face can stream Datasets through the same interface facilitating tokenization and featurization.
  • All the Datasets are tagged and documented with their usage, types, and construction.

In a short while, the company has managed to get a phenomenal rise as a startup with its transformer library that is backed by TensorFlow and PyTorch. It consists of many pre-trained models to perform text classification, information retrieval, and summarisation tasks. This library is extensively used by researchers at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft and downloaded a billion times.

As high-end technology is concentrated in the hands of a few powerful big companies, Hugging Face wants democratisation of AI to extend the benefits of emerging technologies to smaller organisations. Hugging Face Co-founder and CEO Clement Delangue believes that there is a disconnect between the research and engineering team in NLP, hence it aims to be the GitHub for Machine Learning.

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New tool fuses ML and DL features to detect sleep apnea

ML and DL detect sleep apnea

Individuals who suspect having sleep apnea and doctors who diagnose them could soon have a more effective way to detect the condition at home. Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology researchers have developed a ConCAD method that can detect sleep apnea by incorporating expert knowledge into deep learning techniques. This research was presented at the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD), virtually held between Sept. 13-17.

Researchers believe the new tool outperforms all existing baseline methods because deep learning technology is brewed with expert knowledge. This tool automatically learns patterns from electrocardiogram (ECG) data collected by at-home devices, making it a faster and more ideal solution than any other existing sleep apnea diagnostics.

“The standard approach to detect sleep apnea involves polysomnography (sleep study) — that involves a patient staying in hospital overnight — under supervision of a clinical practitioner. This process is time-consuming, tedious, and intrusive,” said Guanje Huang, lead author of the paper.

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Huang explained that a patient’s data is collected through a sleep study that includes — measuring brain waves, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, respiration, and body movements. Later, clinicians devote their time and various resources to analyze data. “It is very crucial to design an accurate model to automatically analyze data, and help doctors detect sleep apnea swiftly,” said Huang

There also exist other tools that automatically detect sleep apnea through at-home devices using computer models. They are either built through traditional machine learning methods that rely on prior knowledge from human experts or through deep learning methods that eliminate the need for such experts. The former requires hand-crafted features, and the latter consists of immense amounts of data resulting in limitations to these standalone approaches.

“The traditional machine learning method usually requires a small amount of data to learn a robust classifier but requires a careful feature extraction and selection process,” Huang explained.“ Whereas the deep learning models usually achieve better performance but require a large dataset.

Huang’s ConCAD (Contrastive Learning-based Cross Attention for Sleep Apnea Detection) model detects sleep apnea precisely by simultaneously leveraging deep learning features and traditional machine learning’s expert knowledge. This model explicitly requires an expert understanding of RR interval (RRI) and R peak envelope (RPE). Existing methods for detecting sleep apnea involve measuring the intervals between and peak of the R wave, which measures cardiac rhythm in a patient’s ventricular walls, in a standard ECG. Whereas ConCAD utilizes a cross-attention mechanism — a deep learning model that assigns weights to each part based on their importance — to fuse the deep learning features with the expert knowledge features, emphasizing the important features automatically.

The working of ConCAD consists of fours steps:

  1. Pass the original raw ECG data through feature extractors to automatically learn patterns from both expert knowledge and deep learning methods that could indicate sleep apnea.
  2. The patterns or features are automatically and synergistically fused and assigned a weight based on each important part.
  3. The model undergoes a contrastive learning process to match similar features closely.
  4. At last, the data is classified based on final features of ECG and corresponding expert knowledge to calculate the patient’s probability of sleep apnea.

Researchers used two publicly available ECG datasets to test the ConCAD model. These datasets comprise more than 26,000 segments of 30-second and two-and-a-half-minute inputs annotated by experts, identifying apnea or regular sleep events. As compared to six existing state-of-the-art sleep apnea detection methods, ConCAD outperforms all the models.  For the first dataset, ConCAD accurately identifies sleep apnea events for 88.75% in one-minute segments, and 91.22% in the five-minute segments, and 82.5% and 83.47% respectively in the second dataset.

Fenglong Ma, assistant professor of information sciences and technology and the principal investigator, said, “If patients use personal ECG devices at home, they may monitor their sleep apnea conditions with the ConCAD model.” “This is a new attempt to assimilate expert knowledge into a deep learning model that will assist doctors in simplifying the diagnostic process of sleep apnea,” added Ma.

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US to offer grants to Small Businesses and help them participate in setting Global AI Standards

US offer grants small businesses

United States representatives Scott Franklin, Jay Obernolte, and others have introduced a bill for providing government grants to small and medium-sized businesses to help them participate in setting global artificial intelligence (AI) standards. 

Government officials believe that while small startups are developing revolutionary innovations and breakthroughs, they don’t have adequate funding and resources to complete the developmental process. 

This new bill will ensure that the United States maintains its number one spot as the global leader in artificial intelligence innovators. Earlier, the President of China, XI Jinping, said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to set a global dominance in the artificial intelligence industry by 2030. 

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The U.S. government has passed this new bill to counter China’s AI strategies. U.S. representatives have derived the bill from a recommendation in the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence’s final report that was given to Congress earlier this year. 

U.S. representative Scott Franklin said, “Advances in Artificial Intelligence will play an increasingly defining role in U.S. global competitiveness. That’s why we need to create an environment that allows American small businesses on the cutting edge of technological innovation to participate in creating global standards and regulation in the A.I. field.”

He added that the new bill would promote economic growth by ensuring that artificial intelligence standards adhere to American Business Standards. The bill is a bipartisan solution for maintaining U.S. supremacy in the tech industry and countering Chinese efforts to influence the artificial intelligence sector. 

“As a former small business owner during the early days of a burgeoning industry, I know first-hand how critical it is to include the voices of small business owners and engineers in the standard setting process,” said U.S. representative McNerney. He also mentioned that being the co-chair of the House A.I. Caucus, his top priority is to ensure that small businesses have a seat at the table.

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IIT Roorkee to start School for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

IIT Roorkee School Data Science Artificial intelligence

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee is set to start a new school for data science and artificial intelligence in collaboration with the Mehta Family Foundation, USA, named Mehta Family School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. 

The school has been established with the purpose of training talents in the field of data analytics and artificial intelligence to meet the increasing demand for such job roles in the global market. It also aims to support government initiatives by seeding startups and entrepreneurship. 

The first batch will begin from September 2022 and will offer undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral programs. IIT Roorkee plans to invite numerous experts to design the curriculum and facilities of the Mehta Family School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.   

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The institute will also provide the best available mentorship to students to let them conduct innovative research. Director of IIT Roorkee, Ajit K Chaturvedi, and CEO of Mehta Family Foundation, Rahul Mehta, signed a contract on 27th September 2021 for this collaborative effort. The school will also facilitate student scholarship and faculty exchange programs. 

“AI-driven technologies are rapidly transforming our world. Academic collaborations between international faculty and institutes can produce individuals poised to address such ongoing global challenges as climate change, resource sustainability, and security,” said Rahul Mehta. 

Ajit K Chaturvedi said, “I am sure they will nurture the growth of the Mehta Family School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at IIT Roorkee.” He also mentioned that a large number of faculty members had contributed their efforts to conceiving the Mehta Family School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.

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Leena AI raises US$30 million in Series B Funding Round

Leena AI Series B Funding round

Human resource technology developing company Leena AI raised US$30 million in its series B funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Other investors like B Capital Group and Greycroft also participated in the funding round. 

The company plans to use the fresh funds to accelerate its product development process in order to keep up with the global demand of its platform. Leena AI will also aim to increase its market share and add new products to its suite dedicated to sales, finance, and IT teams. 

The company’s product comes with an HR service delivery suite, an employee engagement module, and a Covid Response suite that helps businesses to provide a better employee experience. 

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Partner at Greycroft, Mark Terbeek, said, “The Leena AI team has been able to bring HR into the modern era through automation and machine learning, enabling better employee engagement.” He further mentioned that human resource is a field that is in desperate need of disruption as most of the Hr operations are slow and done manually. 

New York-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startup Leena AI was founded by Adit Jain, Anand Prajapati, and Mayank Goyal in 2018. The firm specializes in developing autonomous conversational AI-backed enterprise solutions to enable companies to provide a better experience to their employees. 

Last year, in November, Leena AI raised US$8 million in its series A funding round. This fresh funding brings the company’s total amount raised till date to US$40 million. Leena AI’s platform is used by customers spread across sixty countries, and it is available in over 40 languages. Many industry-leading companies, including Coca-Cola, Nestle, Puma, P&G, Abbott, Al Jazeera, HDFC Bank, Reserve Bank of India, and many others, use Leena AI’s service. 

“Leena AI Employee Experience Suite deeply understands enterprise HR support tickets to solve this very difficult problem at the world’s top enterprises,” said the co-founder and CEO of Leena AI, Adit Jain.

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Haptik launches AI Agent Assist to provide better Customer Experience

haptik launches AI Agent Assist

One of the world’s largest conversational AI developing firms and a subsidiary of Reliance Jio, Haptik launches its new artificial intelligence-powered Agent Assist for improving agent performance and providing an enhanced customer experience. 

The AI tool provides critical information to agents that help them solve customer issues seamlessly. AI Agent Assist enables customer service executives to quickly reply to queries and provide a personalized experience to their customers. 

The platform eliminates the need for agents to access multiple channels to retrieve information by displaying all the necessary data in a single screen; This drastically reduces the time consumed in query resolutions that enable agents to increase their productivity. 

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The Director of Product Management at Haptik, Vikram Kamath, said, “AI Agent Assist brings the best of both worlds by offering recommendations to agents which aren’t user-facing, unless the agent approves, making AI Agent Assist the most low-risk path to leverage AI and make contact centers more efficient and productive.” 

He further mentioned that artificial intelligence is becoming a key differentiator that companies are looking forward to investing in. The tool provides real-time text suggestions with sentence-level completion for agents to help them tackle customer queries tactfully and quickly. 

AI Agent Assist comes with an easy-to-use interface that reduces the training time of new agents that allows companies to focus more on operations. Haptik also provides numerous out-of-the-box integration options with leading CRM platforms like Salesforce, Freshworks, and Zendesk. 

Mumbai-based conversational AI company Haptik was founded by Aakrit Vaish and Swapan Rajdev in the year 2013. To date, the firm has raised total funding of $12.2 million over two rounds. Haptik has a massive customer base that includes industry-leading companies like Oyo, Coca Cola, Tata Group, KFC, Club Mahindra, Zurich Insurance, HP, Ola, and many more. 

“By choosing AI Agent Assist, businesses can create ‘Powerful Agents’ equipped with more knowledge and a higher capacity to handle multiple conversations, with the same accuracy, speed, and precision,” said Kamath.

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Google is redesigning Search using AI technology

Google redesigns web searches

Google has recently announced that it will be applying AI advancements, including Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to improve Google Search. The company demonstrated new features at the Search On event to leverage MUM for web searches by providing relevant content while enhancing web searches to become more natural and intuitive.

One of the new features introduced is “Things to know,” which will focus on making web searches more convenient to understand for people. As this feature understands the behaviour of how people explore topics, it will show search results that align with the topic people are most likely to look at first.

Google explained this use case by searching “acrylic painting,” which may suggest “Things to know” like — how to get started with painting, different styles of acrylic painting, and many more. For the mentioned example, Google is able to identify over 350 different topics that relate to acrylic painting.

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This feature will be rolled out in the coming months that will unlock new ways to — refine search — understanding deeper insights — connect visually rich pages of search results. As images turn people’s visual inspiration into action, these pages would be competing with Pinterest.

To extend further, Google is also upgrading video search. Already, the company identifies key moments inside a video using AI, it now plans to launch features that will identify topics in a video. This feature will provide relevant links that allow users to dig deeper for topics of interest even if the topic is not explicitly mentioned in the video. MUM will understand what the video is about and make suggestions when a related search is made.

In an example, Google showed how a Macaroni penguin’s video could be used to point to a range of related videos for those searching about how Macaroni penguins find their family. As the majority of GenZ learn from YouTube, an initial version of this feature will be introduced on YouTube Search, which will have more visual enhancements in coming months, says Google.

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Adobe to Launch New AI-Powered Selection Upgrade for Lightroom and ACR

Adoe Lightroom Selection tool, Mask Groups

One of the industry-standard image editing software that many photographers use on the go is Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom helps content creators and photographers avail most of the commonly used editing features on Photoshop with its intuitive user interface. Now, Adobe has announced that it will be introducing new upgrades for  Lightroom to help users make selective adjustments, thanks to AI-powered selection tools. This upgrade will also be available to Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw (ACR).

Since the introduction of Lightroom 2 in 2008, the company states this is the “biggest change to providing control over selectively enhancing photos.”

The Adobe Research team intended to introduce AI-powered selection features from Photoshop, such as Select Subject and Sky Replacement, to Lightroom and ACR. Because these features were well-received, the Adobe Research Team was tasked with figuring out how to include them into ACR and Lightroom. However, the imaging processing engines in ACR and Lightroom were incompatible, the engine had to be rewritten from the ground up. This inspired the team to work on improving how selections were handled on the Lightroom app.

Select Sky panel screenshot.
Select Sky creates a precise mask, even around the foliage and uneven edges around the sky, making creating complex selections incredibly fast. Image Credit: Abode

The feature, which is set to launch on October 26th at the 2021 Adobe MAX event, is driven by Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and machine-learning toolset. It will allow photographers to focus on shot subjects such as people, buildings, and animals with a single click to fine-tune color, lighting, tone, and other aspects.

After the user picks a section of the shot, AI is used to detect certain topics or other places of interest in the image, such as the sky. The selection, called a mask, aids photographers in activities such as highlighting individuals in the shade or enhancing washed-out sky.

ACR, Lightroom, and Lightroom Classic previously supported vector-based selections (which are saved as mathematical expressions), but AI-powered masks require bitmap (or image-based) support. The AI-powered masks produce a grayscale picture where the lighter and darker values reflect different levels of selection. Within the new masking engine, Adobe wanted to guarantee that both vector-based and bitmap-based masks could operate together on the same image. While brushes, gradients, and range masks may still be created with vector-based selections to save space, the select subject and select sky tools, which can generate a mask for a subject or sky with a single click, will employ bitmaps.

Adobe created new features for ACR, Lightroom, and Lightroom Classic across desktops, mobile devices, tablets, and the web after it found out how to make those two types of selections work together. 

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Over a year ago, Adobe began work on Lightroom’s new masking capabilities, surveying “tens of thousands of users” to learn about the most common problems they had while making decisions. The surveys also helped Adobe discover what users appreciated about the current selection options in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. The team also looked at how users interact with various masking tools on desktop and mobile devices. With new masking features, the team identified four critical areas to address: More power and flexibility, better workflow and selection structuring, consistency across all platforms, and enhanced in-app support.

Screen shot of a bird on a screen in lightroom.
‘The new Select Subject tool automatically creates a precise mask of the salient subject with a single click, and works on people, animals, and inanimate objects.’ Image and caption credit: Adobe

The team built ‘Mask groups’ to make working with mask tools easier. Users can mix any mask tools inside mask groups. In a single mask group, they can combine brush, gradient, brightness, color range choices, and AI-powered tools to build a mask. Masks can also be subtracted from other masks. Moreover, Adobe users will be able to reverse selections to exclude a subject or sky from being tweaked. E.g., if you wish to change everything but the sky, for example, you may use Select Sky and then flip the masked selection. Another new feature is the option to apply range masks globally, which has been a popular request from users.

It might be difficult to keep track of what’s going on with so many masking tools. To help you manage your workplace, Adobe’s new masking panel comes in handy. The masking panel may be placed anywhere on the desktop, docked, or minimized. They can now name each mask as well, making it easier to keep track of various masks. In addition, Photoshop visualization such as a basic color overlay, color overlay on black and white, image on black, image on white, and more have been included.

Adobe has also improved how masks are organized and grouped. Image credit: Adobe

New in-app help and support features have been introduced to ensure that users understand all of the many masking options available inside the Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom applications. There’s a new interactive tutorial in Lightroom that guides you through all of the masking tools step-by-step.
According to an Adobe blog post, “Adobe’s Research and Design Research teams are working on new AI-powered tools and other innovations that will make use of bitmap-based masks, which it will be delivering later next year.”

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