In this paper, we present the service robot MARLIN and its integration with the K4R platform, a cloud system for complex AI applications in retail. At its core, this platform contains so-called semantic digital twins, a semantically annotated representation of the retail store. MARLIN continuously exchanges data with the K4R platform, improving the robot's capabilities in perception, autonomous navigation, and task planning. We exploit these capabilities in a retail intralogistics scenario, specifically by assisting store employees in stocking shelves. We demonstrate that MARLIN is able to update the digital representation of the retail store by detecting and classifying obstacles, autonomously planning and executing replenishment missions, adapting to unforeseen changes in the environment, and interacting with store employees. Experiments are conducted in simulation, in a laboratory environment, and in a real store. We also describe and evaluate a novel algorithm for autonomous navigation of articulated tractor-trailer systems. The algorithm outperforms the manufacturer's proprietary navigation approach and improves MARLIN's navigation capabilities in confined spaces.

Amazon Prime Day 2024 is officially a couple of weeks away now but we're already starting to see early Prime Day deals pop up. This was expected: Amazon may deem July Prime Day a two-day event, but for years, the online retailer has hosted lead-up deals in order to drum up excitement for the main event. Most early Prime Day deals are exactly that -- early discounts that only Prime members can access -- but every once in a while there are some discounts available to all. We've collected the best early Prime Day deals here, along with the rest of the best discounts on our favorite gadgets that anyone can get from Amazon right now. We'll be updating this post regularly, so check back to see the latest discounts.

Recommendation systems and assistants (from now on, recommenders) - algorithms suggesting items or providing solutions based on users' preferences or requests [99, 105, 141, 166] - influence through online platforms most actions of our day to day life. For example, recommendations on social media suggest new social connections, those on online retail platforms guide users' product choices, navigation services offer routes to desired destinations, and generative AI platforms produce content based on users' requests. Unlike other AI tools, such as medical diagnostic support systems, robotic vision systems, or autonomous driving, which assist in specific tasks or functions, recommenders are ubiquitous in online platforms, shaping our decisions and interactions instantly and profoundly. The influence recommenders exert on users' behaviour may generate long-lasting and often unintended effects on human-AI ecosystems [131], such as amplifying political radicalisation processes [82], increasing CO2 emissions in the environment [36] and amplifying inequality, biases and discriminations [120]. The interaction between humans and recommenders has been examined in various fields using different nomenclatures, research methods and datasets, often producing incongruent findings.

Advances in generative models have led to significant interest in image synthesis, demonstrating the ability to generate high-quality images for a diverse range of text prompts. Despite this progress, most studies ignore the presence of bias. In this paper, we examine several text-to-image models not only by qualitatively assessing their performance in generating accurate images of human faces, groups, and specified numbers of objects but also by presenting a social bias analysis. As expected, models with larger capacity generate higher-quality images. However, we also document the inherent gender or social biases these models possess, offering a more complete understanding of their impact and limitations.

The sales boost for Currys came as the retailer reported an annual profit of 28m, following a huge 462m loss the year before. The company, which has 719 stores across northern Europe selling fridges, washing machines, TVs, computers and other electrical goods, said it had saved hundreds of millions of pounds in the past few years by cutting costs across its UK and Ireland operations. Mr Baldock said the retailer expected technology powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to be the "most exciting new product cycle" since tablets first hit the market in 2010. He said consumers were drawn to AI products, particular PCs and phones, for features such as enhanced photography, language translation and extended battery life. Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said: "Currys has joined the bandwagon to hype up opportunities with AI.

The rise of artificial intelligence in our media and entertainment industries has raised a lot of concerns about programs like Open Al's text-to-video maker Sora replacing the artistic endeavors and aspirations of humans. If those AI made movies are anything like a new brand film about the Toys'R' Us toy store chain's origin story, the only thing we'll have to fear is watching them. Toys'R' Us's current owner WHP Global worked with the Emmy nominated creative agency Native Foreign to create a short brand film called The Origin of Toys'R' Us using OpenAI's text-to-video creator Sora. The film premiered at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and can currently be viewed on the toy retailer's website. The Origin of Toys'R' Us is only a little over a minute long but it's a mix of confusing and eerie.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown superior performance in various applications and fields. To achieve better performance on specialized domains such as law and advertisement, LLMs are often continue pre-trained on in-domain data. However, existing approaches suffer from two major issues. First, in-domain data are scarce compared to general domain-agnostic data. Second, data used for continual pre-training are not task-aware, such that they may not be helpful to downstream applications. We propose TRAIT, a task-oriented in-domain data augmentation framework. Our framework is divided into two parts: in-domain data selection and task-oriented synthetic passage generation. The data selection strategy identifies and selects a large amount of in-domain data from general corpora, and thus significantly enriches domain knowledge in the continual pre-training data. The synthetic passages contain guidance on how to use domain knowledge to answer questions about downstream tasks. We adapt LLMs to two domains: advertisement and math. On average, TRAIT improves LLM performance by 8% in the advertisement domain and 7.5% in the math domain. Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance improvements in various applications such as language modeling (Brown et al., 2020; Touvron et al., 2023; Chowdhery et al., 2023) and visual understanding (Radford et al., 2021). They have also shown superior performance in fields such as finance (Xie et al., 2023b), e-commerce (Ma et al., 2023) and healthcare (Bakhshandeh, 2023). However, the models are usually trained on a large amount of general domain-agnostic data, such as web corpora. Because of the lack of domain-specific training, LLMs suffer from subpar performance when directly applied to certain domains such as advertisement. To adapt LLMs to a specific domain, continual pre-training methods (Gururangan et al., 2020) are commonly applied. In particular, the LLM is continual pre-trained on in-domain corpora, such that it can acquire domain knowledge and better adapt to downstream tasks.

Accurate demand forecasting is crucial for optimizing supply chain management. Traditional methods often fail to capture complex patterns from seasonal variability and special events. Despite advancements in deep learning, interpretable forecasting models remain a challenge. To address this, we introduce the Multi-Channel Data Fusion Network (MCDFN), a hybrid architecture that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to enhance predictive performance by extracting spatial and temporal features from time series data. Our rigorous benchmarking demonstrates that MCDFN outperforms seven other deep-learning models, achieving superior metrics: MSE (23.5738%), RMSE (4.8553%), MAE (3.9991%), and MAPE (20.1575%). Additionally, MCDFN's predictions were statistically indistinguishable from actual values, confirmed by a paired t-test with a 5% p-value and a 10-fold cross-validated statistical paired t-test. We apply explainable AI techniques like ShapTime and Permutation Feature Importance to enhance interpretability. This research advances demand forecasting methodologies and offers practical guidelines for integrating MCDFN into supply chain systems, highlighting future research directions for scalability and user-friendly deployment.

Demand prediction is a crucial task for e-commerce and physical retail businesses, especially during high-stake sales events. However, the limited availability of historical data from these peak periods poses a significant challenge for traditional forecasting methods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages strategically chosen proxy data reflective of potential sales patterns from similar entities during non-peak periods, enriched by features learned from a graph neural networks (GNNs)-based forecasting model, to predict demand during peak events. We formulate the demand prediction as a meta-learning problem and develop the Feature-based First-Order Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (F-FOMAML) algorithm that leverages proxy data from non-peak periods and GNN-generated relational metadata to learn feature-specific layer parameters, thereby adapting to demand forecasts for peak events. Theoretically, we show that by considering domain similarities through task-specific metadata, our model achieves improved generalization, where the excess risk decreases as the number of training tasks increases. Empirical evaluations on large-scale industrial datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach. Compared to existing state-of-the-art models, our method demonstrates a notable improvement in demand prediction accuracy, reducing the Mean Absolute Error by 26.24% on an internal vending machine dataset and by 1.04% on the publicly accessible JD.com dataset.

Online decision-makers often obtain predictions on future variables, such as arrivals, demands, inventories, and so on. These predictions can be generated from simple forecasting algorithms for univariate time-series, all the way to state-of-the-art machine learning models that leverage multiple time-series and additional feature information. However, the prediction accuracy is unknown to decision-makers a priori, hence blindly following the predictions can be harmful. In this paper, we address this problem by developing algorithms that utilize predictions in a manner that is robust to the unknown prediction accuracy. We consider the Online Resource Allocation Problem, a generic model for online decision-making, in which a limited amount of resources may be used to satisfy a sequence of arriving requests. Prior work has characterized the best achievable performances when the arrivals are either generated stochastically (i.i.d.) or completely adversarially, and shown that algorithms exist which match these bounds under both arrival models, without ``knowing'' the underlying model. To this backdrop, we introduce predictions in the form of shadow prices on each type of resource. Prediction accuracy is naturally defined to be the distance between the predictions and the actual shadow prices. We tightly characterize, via a formal lower bound, the extent to which any algorithm can optimally leverage predictions (that is, to ``follow'' the predictions when accurate, and ``ignore'' them when inaccurate) without knowing the prediction accuracy or the underlying arrival model. Our main contribution is then an algorithm which achieves this lower bound. Finally, we empirically validate our algorithm with a large-scale experiment on real data from the retailer H&M.