# FITS: Towards an AI-Driven Fashion Information Tool for Sustainability

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26017 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26017/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [VITON: An Image-based Virtual Try-on Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08447/) (2017)
- [SMAC3: A Versatile Bayesian Optimization Package for Hyperparameter Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09831/) (2021)
- [Unexpected Improvements to Expected Improvement for Bayesian Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20708/) (2023)
- [Calibrated Language Models Must Hallucinate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14648/) (2023)
- [ClimateBert: A Pretrained Language Model for Climate-Related Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12010/) (2021)
- [Environmental Claim Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00507/) (2022)
- [Assessing Generative Language Models in Classification Tasks: Performance and Self-Evaluation Capabilities in the Environmental and Climate Change Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17362/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Access to credible sustainability information in the fashion industry remains limited and challenging to interpret, despite growing public and regulatory demands for transparency. General-purpose language models often lack domain-specific knowledge and tend to "hallucinate", which is particularly harmful for fields where factual correctness is crucial. This work explores how Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques can be applied to classify sustainability data for fashion brands, thereby addressing the scarcity of credible and accessible information in this domain. We present a prototype Fashion Information Tool for Sustainability (FITS), a transformer-based system that extracts and classifies sustainability information from credible, unstructured text sources: NGO reports and scientific publications. Several BERT-based language models, including models pretrained on scientific and climate-specific data, are fine-tuned on our curated corpus using a domain-specific classification schema, with hyperparameters optimized via Bayesian optimization. FITS allows users to search for relevant data, analyze their own data, and explore the information via an interactive interface. We evaluated FITS in two focus groups of potential users concerning usability, visual design, content clarity, possible use cases, and desired features. Our results highlight the value of domain-adapted NLP in promoting informed decision-making and emphasize the broader potential of AI applications in addressing climate-related challenges. Finally, this work provides a valuable dataset, the SustainableTextileCorpus, along with a methodology for future updates. Code available at [github(.)com/daphne12345/FITS](https://github.com/daphne12345/FITS).