Advancing AI: Highlights from May

From research milestones to conference prep, May was a steady month of progress across Sony AI. Our team's advanced work in vision-based reinforcement learning, continued building toward CVPR and ICML, and shared updates on GT Sophy’s latest release. Here's a look at what we’ve been working on, and what’s coming next.

Latest Research

Research Spotlight:
A Champion-level Vision-based Reinforcement Learning Agent for Competitive Racing in Gran Turismo 7

This month, Sony AI researchers published a new milestone in autonomous racing: the first vision-based reinforcement learning agent to achieve champion-level performance in competitive races using only onboard sensors, no external instrumentation, or precise localization required.

This work builds on research presented at RLC 2024, where Sony AI introduced a vision-based agent capable of super-human lap times in solo time trial scenarios. The new paper extends that foundation to full multi-opponent races, requiring the agent to handle partial observability, occlusions, and high-speed interactions with other cars in real time.

Building on earlier GT Sophy work, the agent operates using an ego-centric camera view and real-time proprioceptive data. It relies on an asymmetric actor-critic architecture during training, where the actor learns to drive using local visual input and the critic accesses global features like opponent positioning to guide learning.

Tested in Gran Turismo 7®, the agent consistently outperformed human experts, world champions, and previous versions of GT Sophy, navigating complex scenarios like Tokyo’s narrow streets and Sarthe’s high-speed straights with precision and sportsmanship.

The researchers write, "[To] the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first vision-based autonomous racing agent to demonstrate champion-level performance in competitive racing scenarios.”

This research sets a new benchmark for real-time, sensor-based AI racing and highlights the potential of reinforcement learning in dynamic, high-performance environments.

• Read the paper: A Champion-level Vision-based Reinforcement Learning Agent for Competitive Racing in Gran Turismo 7
• Tutorial: Watch the video
• Further Reading: Gaming and Interactive Agents – Sony AI

Sony AI at Global Events

Coming Soon: CVPR & ICML 2025

As we wrap up May, our teams are preparing to share new research at two of the year’s leading machine learning and computer vision conferences: CVPR 2025 and ICML 2025.

Sony AI will present work across multiple focus areas at both events—ranging from generative models and diffusion-based methods to advancements in robotics and computer vision systems. We're looking forward to joining researchers from around the world to explore how new techniques can push boundaries.

• CVPR 2025 (June 17–21, 2025 | Nashville, TN)
  One of the top conferences in computer vision, CVPR is where the latest in image, video, and multimodal understanding takes center stage.
  
  
• ICML 2025 (July 20–26, 2025 | Vienna, Austria)
  ICML is a premier venue for machine learning research, with sessions spanning theoretical innovations and real-world applications.
  
  

More details coming soon: including accepted paper announcements, researcher spotlights, and behind-the-scenes insights from our teams as the conference dates approach.

Further Reading

In the meantime, revisit our highlights from CVPR 2024 and ICML 2024 to see where we left off last year, and how far we’ve come since.

ICML 2024:

• Ushering in Needed Change in the Pursuit of More Diverse Datasets – Sony AI
• Unleashing the Potential of Federated Learning with COALA – Sony AI
• Research Vault:The Research Vault | COALA: A Practical and Vision-Centric Federated Learning Platform | Sony AI

CVPR 2024:

• FedMef: Towards Memory-efficient Federated Dynamic Pruning – Sony AI
• Hearing Anything Anywhere – Sony AI

Spotlight Talk: AI at the Core of CMOS Sensor Evolution

In May, Lorenzo Servadei, Head of AI for Chip Design at Sony AI, gave an invited talk at Stanford University titled "Intelligent Fabrication for Intelligent Vision." His presentation explored how AI is reshaping CMOS sensor innovation, from smarter pixel-level processing to machine learning in semiconductor process optimization, yield prediction, and design-technology co-optimization. This work reinforces Sony AI’s role in driving the next generation of intelligent sensing technologies.

Sony AI in the News

GT Sophy Is Off to the Races with a New Track in Gran Turismo™ 7

As part of the Gran Turismo 7 1.59 update for PlayStation®5, GT Sophy can now race against players on a new track: Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix Layout.

Learn More from GTPlanet

Join the Conversation

Connect with us on LinkedIn, Instagram, or X, and let us know what you’d like to see in future editions. Until next month, keep imagining the possibilities with Sony AI.