Making ideal decisions as a product leader in a web-facing company is extremely difficult. In addition to navigating the ambiguity of customer satisfaction and achieving business goals, one must also pave a path forward for ones' products and services to remain relevant, desirable, and profitable. Data and experimentation to test product hypotheses are key to informing product decisions. Online controlled experiments by A/B testing may provide the best data to support such decisions with high confidence, but can be time-consuming and expensive, especially when one wants to understand impact to key business metrics such as retention or long-term value. Offline experimentation allows one to rapidly iterate and test, but often cannot provide the same level of confidence, and cannot easily shine a light on impact on business metrics. We introduce a novel, lightweight, and flexible approach to investigating hypotheses, called scenario analysis, that aims to support product leaders' decisions using data about users and estimates of business metrics. Its strengths are that it can provide guidance on trade-offs that are incurred by growing or shifting consumption, estimate trends in long-term outcomes like retention and other important business metrics, and can generate hypotheses about relationships between metrics at scale.
Clients often partner with AI experts to develop AI applications tailored to their needs. In these partnerships, careful planning and clear communication are critical, as inaccurate or incomplete specifications can result in misaligned model characteristics, expensive reworks, and potential friction between collaborators. Unfortunately, given the complexity of requirements ranging from functionality, data, and governance, effective guidelines for collaborative specification of requirements in client-AI expert collaborations are missing. In this work, we introduce AINeedsPlanner, a workbook that AI experts and clients can use to facilitate effective interchange and clear specifications. The workbook is based on (1) an interview of 10 completed AI application project teams, which identifies and characterizes steps in AI application planning and (2) a study with 12 AI experts, which defines a taxonomy of AI experts' information needs and dimensions that affect the information needs. Finally, we demonstrate the workbook's utility with two case studies in real-world settings.
Data assimilation (DA), as an indispensable component within contemporary Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems, plays a crucial role in generating the analysis that significantly impacts forecast performance. Nevertheless, the development of an efficient DA system poses significant challenges, particularly in establishing intricate relationships between the background data and the vast amount of multi-source observation data within limited time windows in operational settings. To address these challenges, researchers design complex pre-processing methods for each observation type, leveraging approximate modeling and the power of super-computing clusters to expedite solutions. The emergence of deep learning (DL) models has been a game-changer, offering unified multi-modal modeling, enhanced nonlinear representation capabilities, and superior parallelization. These advantages have spurred efforts to integrate DL models into various domains of weather modeling. Remarkably, DL models have shown promise in matching, even surpassing, the forecast accuracy of leading operational NWP models worldwide. This success motivates the exploration of DL-based DA frameworks tailored for weather forecasting models. In this study, we introduces FuxiDA, a generalized DL-based DA framework for assimilating satellite observations. By assimilating data from Advanced Geosynchronous Radiation Imager (AGRI) aboard Fengyun-4B, FuXi-DA consistently mitigates analysis errors and significantly improves forecast performance. Furthermore, through a series of single-observation experiments, Fuxi-DA has been validated against established atmospheric physics, demonstrating its consistency and reliability.
The origins of fiducial inference trace back to the 1930s when R. A. Fisher first introduced the concept as a response to what he perceived as a limitation of Bayesian inference - the requirement for a subjective prior distribution on model parameters in cases where no prior information was available. However, Fisher's initial fiducial approach fell out of favor as complications arose, particularly in multi-parameter problems. In the wake of 2000, amidst a renewed interest in contemporary adaptations of fiducial inference, generalized fiducial inference (GFI) emerged to extend Fisher's fiducial argument, providing a promising avenue for addressing numerous crucial and practical inference challenges. Nevertheless, the adoption of GFI has been limited due to its often demanding mathematical derivations and the necessity for implementing complex Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms. This complexity has impeded its widespread utilization and practical applicability. This paper presents a significant advancement by introducing an innovative variant of GFI designed to alleviate these challenges. Specifically, this paper proposes AutoGFI, an easily implementable algorithm that streamlines the application of GFI to a broad spectrum of inference problems involving additive noise. AutoGFI can be readily implemented as long as a fitting routine is available, making it accessible to a broader audience of researchers and practitioners. To demonstrate its effectiveness, AutoGFI is applied to three contemporary and challenging problems: tensor regression, matrix completion, and regression with network cohesion. These case studies highlight the immense potential of GFI and illustrate AutoGFI's promising performance when compared to specialized solutions for these problems. Overall, this research paves the way for a more accessible and powerful application of GFI in a range of practical domains.
The highly specialist terms `quantum computing' and `quantum information', together with the broader term `quantum technologies', now appear regularly in the mainstream media. While this is undoubtedly highly exciting for physicists and investors alike, a key question for society concerns such systems' vulnerabilities -- and in particular, their vulnerability to collective manipulation. Here we present and discuss a new form of vulnerability in such systems, that we have identified based on detailed many-body quantum mechanical calculations. The impact of this new vulnerability is that groups of adversaries can maximally disrupt these systems' global quantum state which will then jeopardize their quantum functionality. It will be almost impossible to detect these attacks since they do not change the Hamiltonian and the purity remains the same; they do not entail any real-time communication between the attackers; and they can last less than a second. We also argue that there can be an implicit amplification of such attacks because of the statistical character of modern non-state actor groups. A countermeasure could be to embed future quantum technologies within redundant classical networks. We purposely structure the discussion in this chapter so that the first sections are self-contained and can be read by non-specialists.
Konnektor is a connection protocol designed to solve the challenge of managing unique peers within distributed peer-to-peer networks. By prioritizing network integrity and efficiency, Konnektor offers a comprehensive solution that safeguards against the spread of duplicate peers while optimizing resource utilization. This paper provides a detailed explanation of the protocol's key components, including peer addressing, connection initialization, detecting peer duplications and mitigation strategies against potential security threats.
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have undergone a rapid evolution, giving rise to significant advancements in the realm of multimodal understanding tasks. However, the majority of these models are trained and evaluated on English-centric datasets, leaving a gap in the development and evaluation of VLMs for other languages, such as Japanese. This gap can be attributed to the lack of methodologies for constructing VLMs and the absence of benchmarks to accurately measure their performance. To address this issue, we introduce a novel benchmark, Japanese Heron-Bench, for evaluating Japanese capabilities of VLMs. The Japanese Heron-Bench consists of a variety of imagequestion answer pairs tailored to the Japanese context. Additionally, we present a baseline Japanese VLM that has been trained with Japanese visual instruction tuning datasets. Our Heron-Bench reveals the strengths and limitations of the proposed VLM across various ability dimensions. Furthermore, we clarify the capability gap between strong closed models like GPT-4V and the baseline model, providing valuable insights for future research in this domain. We release the benchmark dataset and training code to facilitate further developments in Japanese VLM research.
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) have emerged as a disruptive technology with the potential to revolutionize wireless communication systems. In this paper, we present RIShield, a novel application of RIS technology specifically designed for radiation-sensitive environments. The aim of RIShield is to enable electromagnetic blackouts, preventing radiation leakage from target areas. We propose a comprehensive framework for RIShield deployment, considering the unique challenges and requirements of radiation-sensitive environments. By strategically positioning RIS panels, we create an intelligent shielding mechanism that selectively absorbs and reflects electromagnetic waves, effectively blocking radiation transmission. To achieve optimal performance, we model the corresponding channel and design a dynamic control that adjusts the RIS configuration based on real-time radiation monitoring. By leveraging the principles of reconfiguration and intelligent control, RIShield ensures adaptive and efficient protection while minimizing signal degradation. Through full-wave and ray-tracing simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of RIShield in achieving significant electromagnetic attenuation. Our results highlight the potential of RIS technology to address critical concerns in radiation-sensitive environments, paving the way for safer and more secure operations in industries such as healthcare, nuclear facilities, and defense.
Effective editing of personal content holds a pivotal role in enabling individuals to express their creativity, weaving captivating narratives within their visual stories, and elevate the overall quality and impact of their visual content. Therefore, in this work, we introduce SwapAnything, a novel framework that can swap any objects in an image with personalized concepts given by the reference, while keeping the context unchanged. Compared with existing methods for personalized subject swapping, SwapAnything has three unique advantages: (1) precise control of arbitrary objects and parts rather than the main subject, (2) more faithful preservation of context pixels, (3) better adaptation of the personalized concept to the image. First, we propose targeted variable swapping to apply region control over latent feature maps and swap masked variables for faithful context preservation and initial semantic concept swapping. Then, we introduce appearance adaptation, to seamlessly adapt the semantic concept into the original image in terms of target location, shape, style, and content during the image generation process. Extensive results on both human and automatic evaluation demonstrate significant improvements of our approach over baseline methods on personalized swapping. Furthermore, SwapAnything shows its precise and faithful swapping abilities across single object, multiple objects, partial object, and cross-domain swapping tasks. SwapAnything also achieves great performance on text-based swapping and tasks beyond swapping such as object insertion.
Neural implicit scene representations have recently shown encouraging results in dense visual SLAM. However, existing methods produce low-quality scene reconstruction and low-accuracy localization performance when scaling up to large indoor scenes and long sequences. These limitations are mainly due to their single, global radiance field with finite capacity, which does not adapt to large scenarios. Their end-to-end pose networks are also not robust enough with the growth of cumulative errors in large scenes. To this end, we introduce PLGSLAM, a neural visual SLAM system capable of high-fidelity surface reconstruction and robust camera tracking in real-time. To handle large-scale indoor scenes, PLGSLAM proposes a progressive scene representation method which dynamically allocates new local scene representation trained with frames within a local sliding window. This allows us to scale up to larger indoor scenes and improves robustness (even under pose drifts). In local scene representation, PLGSLAM utilizes tri-planes for local high-frequency features with multi-layer perceptron (MLP) networks for the low-frequency feature, achieving smoothness and scene completion in unobserved areas. Moreover, we propose local-to-global bundle adjustment method with a global keyframe database to address the increased pose drifts on long sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that PLGSLAM achieves state-of-the-art scene reconstruction results and tracking performance across various datasets and scenarios (both in small and large-scale indoor environments).
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.