-- Accurate multi - horizon retail forecasts are critical for inventory and promotions. We present a novel study of weekly Walmart sales (45 stores, 2010 - 2012) using a Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) that fuses static store identifiers with time - varying exoge nous signals (holidays, CPI, fuel price, temperature). The pipeline produces 1 - 5 - week - ahead probabilistic forecasts via QuantileLoss, yielding calibrated 90% prediction intervals and interpretability through variable - selection networks, static enr ichment, and temporal attention. On a fixed 2012 hold - out dataset, TFT achieves an RMSE of $ 57.9k USD per store - week and an R of 0.9875. Across 5 - fold chronological cross - validation, the averages are RMSE = $ 64.6k USD and R = 0.9844, outperforming XGB, CNN, LSTM, and CNN - LSTM baseline models .

Language model finetuning often results in learning undesirable traits in combination with desired ones. To address this, we propose inoculation prompting: modifying finetuning data by prepending a short system-prompt instruction that deliberately elicits the undesirable trait. At test time, we evaluate without the instruction; inoculated models have much lower expression of the trait than models trained with unmodified training data. Inoculation is selective: in a toy setting where assistant responses are always in Spanish and ALL-CAPS, an appropriate inoculation (e.g., ``You always speak in Spanish.'') teaches the model to capitalize responses while still responding in English. We find that inoculation is also effective across several additional settings: reducing emergent misalignment (EM) from task-specific finetuning, defending against backdoor injections, and mitigating the transmission of traits via subliminal learning. Follow-up analysis suggests a mechanism: making a trait less surprising via inoculation reduces optimization pressure to globally update the model, thereby reducing the degree of generalization. Our analysis relates to prior work on EM: inoculation explains prior findings that educational contexts mitigate EM from insecure code. Beyond demonstrating a simple and effective technique for selective learning, our results contribute to a better conceptual understanding of how and why language models generalize.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. KitKat was friendly with many customers of Randa's Market in San Francisco's Mission District. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . San Francisco has been mourning the death of KitKat, a beloved corner-store cat who died after being struck by a Waymo robotaxi last week.

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD), which aims to detect anomalies that deviate from expectation, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Existing advancements in VAD primarily focus on model architectures and training strategies, while devoting insufficient attention to evaluation metrics and benchmarks. In this paper, we rethink VAD evaluation methods through comprehensive analyses, revealing three critical limitations in current practices: 1) existing metrics are significantly influenced by single annotation bias; 2) current metrics fail to reward early detection of anomalies; 3) available benchmarks lack the capability to evaluate scene overfitting of fully/weakly-supervised algorithms. To address these limitations, we propose three novel evaluation methods: first, we establish probabilistic AUC/AP (Prob-AUC/AP) metrics utlizing multi-round annotations to mitigate single annotation bias; second, we develop a Latency-aware Average Precision (LaAP) metric that rewards early and accurate anomaly detection; and finally, we introduce two hard normal benchmarks (UCF-HN, MSAD-HN) with videos specifically designed to evaluate scene overfitting. We report performance comparisons of ten state-of-the-art VAD approaches using our proposed evaluation methods, providing novel perspectives for future VAD model development. We release our data and code in https://github.com/Kamino666/RethinkingVAD.

We quantify the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) on firm productivity through a series of large-scale randomized field experiments involving millions of users and products at a leading cross-border online retail platform. Over six months in 2023-2024, GenAI-based enhancements were integrated into seven consumer-facing business workflows. We find that GenAI adoption significantly increases sales, with treatment effects ranging from $0\%$ to $16.3\%$, depending on GenAI's marginal contribution relative to existing firm practices. Because inputs and prices were held constant across experimental arms, these gains map directly into total factor productivity improvements. Across the four GenAI applications with positive effects, the implied annual incremental value is approximately $\$ 5$ per consumer-an economically meaningful impact given the retailer's scale and the early stage of GenAI adoption. The primary mechanism operates through higher conversion rates, consistent with GenAI reducing frictions in the marketplace and improving consumer experience. We also document substantial heterogeneity: smaller and newer sellers, as well as less experienced consumers, exhibit disproportionately larger gains. Our findings provide novel, large-scale causal evidence on the productivity effects of GenAI in online retail, highlighting both its immediate value and broader potential.

When online sellers use AI learning algorithms to automatically compete on e-commerce platforms, there is concern that they will learn to coordinate on higher than competitive prices. However, this concern was primarily raised in single-dimension price competition. We investigate whether this prediction holds when sellers make pricing and advertising decisions together, i.e., two-dimensional decisions. We analyze competition in multi-agent reinforcement learning, and use a large-scale dataset from Amazon.com to provide empirical evidence. We show that when consumers have high search costs, learning algorithms can coordinate on prices lower than competitive prices, facilitating a win-win-win for consumers, sellers, and platforms. This occurs because algorithms learn to coordinate on lower advertising bids, which lower advertising costs, leading to lower prices and enlarging demand on the platform. We also show that our results generalize to any learning algorithm that uses exploration of price and advertising bids. Consistent with our predictions, an empirical analysis shows that price levels exhibit a negative interaction between estimated consumer search costs and algorithm usage index. We analyze the platform's strategic response and find that reserve price adjustments will not increase platform profits, but commission adjustments will, while maintaining the beneficial outcomes for both sellers and consumers.

Security researchers discovered SessionReaper, a serious vulnerability in Magento and Adobe Commerce that allows hackers to hijack shopping sessions and steal data.

We brought 10 of the most popular artificial Christmas trees into a studio, had volunteers assemble them, then got three interior designers to pick the best through blind judging. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. You can spend hours scrolling through lists of the best artificial Christmas trees and still end up wondering what to buy. How real does it look? Are the branches strong enough to hold that lopsided homemade macaroni ornament you've hung on your tree since 2004? We decided to settle the debate once and for all by bringing the best-selling artificial trees from three leading brands into a studio for a blind-judged contest. We got 10 trees from Balsam Hill, King of Christmas, and National Tree Company, then found 10 assemblers to put the trees together and fluff them.

Gear Home Shark's pet-friendly air purifier is cheaper than ever at Amazon for a limited time The most popular Shark air purifiers are on sale for their lowest prices of the year at Amazon. The deals also include vacuums, styling products, and more. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Have you turned your home's heat on for the winter yet? I finally gave in and switched my thermostat over to heat only to find myself smelling the familiar dusty scent emanating through my vents.

Life is too short to use bad nonstick cookware. These All-Clad pans are the gold standard, and they're less expensive than usual. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. It can be hard to build an Adulting Arsenal.