PRESS RELEASE

QUEZON CITY (Sept. 29, 2025) — Filipino ingenuity is set to take the global stage with the recognition of a sari-sari store-inspired AI retail environment simulation as one of the year’s best innovations for the International Conference on Computer Vision 2025.

“Sari Sandbox: A Virtual Retail Store Environment for Embodied AI Agents,” from the team led by Prof. Rowel Atienza of the University of the Philippines Diliman College of Engineering’s Electrical and Electronics Engineering Institute, has been selected as one of the “Best of ICCV,” a prestigious showcase of research from among 12,000 submissions worldwide. This year’s ICCV will be held on Oct. 19-23, 2025.

“This recognition at ICCV, one of the world’s most competitive conferences in computer vision and AI, demonstrates that the Philippines can stand alongside the world’s best researchers in AI,” Atienza said.

Sari Sandbox is the first comprehensive retail store simulation environment designed to train AI systems in performing shopping tasks. With the project’s photorealistic 3D simulation environment and dataset from human participants interacting with it through a virtual reality controller, embodied AI agents could learn complex shopping behaviors and tasks — from navigating store aisles to reading product labels such as expiration dates and scanning barcodes at checkout — benchmarked against authentic human behavioral data.

Lead researcher Janika Deborah Gajo, a BS Computer Engineering student, explained that their team surveyed several convenience stores across Metro Manila to ensure that the simulation “accurately represents the retail experience” as “such interactive digital replicas of convenience stores as AI playgrounds do not exist.”

The retail sector, particularly the sari-sari store model that accounts for nearly 70% of manufactured goods sold in the Philippines, remains a largely unexplored territory for AI development because existing systems focus on household tasks. Through Sari Sandbox’s simulation environment, AI assistants can be developed for inventory management, store layout design, product placement optimization, customer service and supply chain optimization — technologies particularly valuable for the country’s 1.3 million sari-sari stores.

Sari Sandbox co-author Emmanuel Maminta, an AI PhD student, shared that their goal was to “build AI that can make smart, practical decisions that mirror human-level reasoning. By developing AI that can handle tasks like budgeting and grocery planning — tasks every Filipino knows well — we’re advancing practical AI solutions rooted in Filipino ingenuity.”

While the project’s recognition in the conference reflects the university’s growing prominence in AI research, UP President Angelo Jimenez emphasized the bigger, more important, picture: “It demonstrates how our researchers are leveraging Filipino cultural contexts to advance global scientific knowledge while addressing challenges directly relevant to our economy.”

The complete research, including simulation environment and datasets, is available to researchers worldwide through open-source platforms. To know more about Sari Sandbox, visit the project website at sarisandbox.github.io.

Check out the best of ICCV.