42-Issue 3
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Browsing 42-Issue 3 by Author "El-Assady, Mennatallah"
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Item Doom or Deliciousness: Challenges and Opportunities for Visualization in the Age of Generative Models(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2023) Schetinger, Victor; Bartolomeo, Sara Di; El-Assady, Mennatallah; McNutt, Andrew; Miller, Matthias; Passos, João Paulo Apolinário; Adams, Jane L.; Bujack, Roxana; Archambault, Daniel; Schreck, TobiasGenerative text-to-image models (as exemplified by DALL-E, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion) have recently made enormous technological leaps, demonstrating impressive results in many graphical domains-from logo design to digital painting to photographic composition. However, the quality of these results has led to existential crises in some fields of art, leading to questions about the role of human agency in the production of meaning in a graphical context. Such issues are central to visualization, and while these generative models have yet to be widely applied in visualization, it seems only a matter of time until their integration is manifest. Seeking to circumvent similar ponderous dilemmas, we attempt to understand the roles that generative models might play across visualization.We do so by constructing a framework that characterizes what these technologies offer at various stages of the visualization workflow, augmented and analyzed through semi-structured interviews with 21 experts from related domains. Through this work, we map the space of opportunities and risks that might arise in this intersection, identifying doomsday prophecies and delicious low-hanging fruits that are ripe for research.Item VISITOR: Visual Interactive State Sequence Exploration for Reinforcement Learning(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2023) Metz, Yannick; Bykovets, Eugene; Joos, Lucas; Keim, Daniel; El-Assady, Mennatallah; Bujack, Roxana; Archambault, Daniel; Schreck, TobiasUnderstanding the behavior of deep reinforcement learning agents is a crucial requirement throughout their development. Existing work has addressed the identification of observable behavioral patterns in state sequences or analysis of isolated internal representations; however, the overall decision-making of deep-learning RL agents remains opaque. To tackle this, we present VISITOR, a visual analytics system enabling the analysis of entire state sequences, the diagnosis of singular predictions, and the comparison between agents. A sequence embedding view enables the multiscale analysis of state sequences, utilizing custom embedding techniques for a stable spatialization of the observations and internal states. We provide multiple layers: (1) a state space embedding, highlighting different groups of states inside the state-action sequences, (2) a trajectory view, emphasizing decision points, (3) a network activation mapping, visualizing the relationship between observations and network activations, (4) a transition embedding, enabling the analysis of state-to-state transitions. The embedding view is accompanied by an interactive reward view that captures the temporal development of metrics, which can be linked directly to states in the embedding. Lastly, a model list allows for the quick comparison of models across multiple metrics. Annotations can be exported to communicate results to different audiences. Our two-stage evaluation with eight experts confirms the effectiveness in identifying states of interest, comparing the quality of policies, and reasoning about the internal decision-making processes.