The integration of international supply chain management and E-business

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program; and, (S.M. in Ocean Systems Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-105).Internet technology has changed this world rapidly in the past decade. The influence of E-business on the economy and business practice has been tremendous. The focus of many companies has been on improving the extended enterprise transactions including Business-to Customer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B). Facing this shift in corporate focus, more and more companies realize the importance of supply chain management in the global E-business environment. The purpose of this thesis is to understand the relationship between supply chain management and E-business, especially from international point of view. The analysis started from the review of supply chain management and E-business, further continued on the strategic impact of E-business on supply chain management and discussed the associate issues during the integration of E-business and supply chain. Finally, some future opportunities will be introduced to illustrate new developments in the E-supply chain environment, especially for small business.by Yujun (Eugene) Xiao.S.M.in Ocean Systems ManagementS.M

CCM: Adding Conditional Controls to Text-to-Image Consistency Models

Consistency Models (CMs) have showed a promise in creating visual content efficiently and with high quality. However, the way to add new conditional controls to the pretrained CMs has not been explored. In this technical report, we consider alternative strategies for adding ControlNet-like conditional control to CMs and present three significant findings. 1) ControlNet trained for diffusion models (DMs) can be directly applied to CMs for high-level semantic controls but struggles with low-level detail and realism control. 2) CMs serve as an independent class of generative models, based on which ControlNet can be trained from scratch using Consistency Training proposed by Song et al. 3) A lightweight adapter can be jointly optimized under multiple conditions through Consistency Training, allowing for the swift transfer of DMs-based ControlNet to CMs. We study these three solutions across various conditional controls, including edge, depth, human pose, low-resolution image and masked image with text-to-image latent consistency models.Comment: Project Page: https://swiftforce.github.io/CC

CoDeF: Content Deformation Fields for Temporally Consistent Video Processing

We present the content deformation field CoDeF as a new type of video representation, which consists of a canonical content field aggregating the static contents in the entire video and a temporal deformation field recording the transformations from the canonical image (i.e., rendered from the canonical content field) to each individual frame along the time axis.Given a target video, these two fields are jointly optimized to reconstruct it through a carefully tailored rendering pipeline.We advisedly introduce some regularizations into the optimization process, urging the canonical content field to inherit semantics (e.g., the object shape) from the video.With such a design, CoDeF naturally supports lifting image algorithms for video processing, in the sense that one can apply an image algorithm to the canonical image and effortlessly propagate the outcomes to the entire video with the aid of the temporal deformation field.We experimentally show that CoDeF is able to lift image-to-image translation to video-to-video translation and lift keypoint detection to keypoint tracking without any training.More importantly, thanks to our lifting strategy that deploys the algorithms on only one image, we achieve superior cross-frame consistency in processed videos compared to existing video-to-video translation approaches, and even manage to track non-rigid objects like water and smog.Project page can be found at https://qiuyu96.github.io/CoDeF/.Comment: Project Webpage: https://qiuyu96.github.io/CoDeF/, Code: https://github.com/qiuyu96/CoDe

Pre-splitting weakening failure characteristics of hard overburden and height control mechanism of water-conducting fracture zone

In order to address the issue of high development of hard overlying rock water-conducting fracture zones in deep coal mining and achieve water-preserved coal mining by reducing the height of water-conducting fracture zones, a new method is proposed in this study, which combines the techniques of pre-fracturing and weakening of hard main controlling overlying strata. This study comprehensively investigates the modification effect of pre-fracturing and weakening of hard main controlling overlying strata through laboratory experiments, theoretical analysis, and numerical simulation. The control mechanisms of different weakening layers on water-conducting fracture zones are elaborated and validated through field measurements. The results demonstrate that pre-existing fractures can induce the rock mass to shift its failure mode from intact rock fracturing to tension-shear failure controlled by pre-existing fractures, leading to a reduction in the severity of rock mass failure. The weakening effect of pre-existing fractures on the hard rock mass is revealed, and the damage variables coupled with stress and fractures are calculated. The relationship between the degree of weakening and the transformation of rock properties is qualitatively analyzed. It is found that the energy storage capacity of the rock mass is reduced while the dissipation capacity is enhanced after the modification. Numerical simulations are conducted to evaluate the control effect of different weakening layers on water-conducting fracture zones. By comparing the dynamic evolution of overlying rock failure modes, fracture counts, and failure heights, it is observed that the “saddle-shaped” failure mode gradually weakens with the increase of weakening layer height, and the evolution trend of fracture counts follows a pattern of “slow increase-sudden increase”. The dynamic evolution of failure height for unweakened and moderately to highly weakened overlying strata approximately exhibits an “S” shape, while the moderately weakened overlying strata exhibit a “semi-ejection” shape. Based on the analysis of the characteristics of failure in hard rock layers at different positions, the mechanisms of controlling the development of water-conducting fracture zones by different pre-fracturing weakening layers are revealed. Furthermore, using the borehole measurement method, the development height of the “two zones” under the condition of top plate fracturing in Mengcun mine is obtained. It is observed that the fracture extraction ratio is reduced under the condition of pre-fracturing weakening, thus preliminarily validating the inhibitory effect of top plate pre-fracturing weakening on the development of water-conducting fracture zones.It provides theoretical and scientific basis for coupling disaster prevention and control, water resources and ecological protection

Mix-of-Show: Decentralized Low-Rank Adaptation for Multi-Concept Customization of Diffusion Models

Public large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion, have gained significant attention from the community. These models can be easily customized for new concepts using low-rank adaptations (LoRAs). However, the utilization of multiple concept LoRAs to jointly support multiple customized concepts presents a challenge. We refer to this scenario as decentralized multi-concept customization, which involves single-client concept tuning and center-node concept fusion. In this paper, we propose a new framework called Mix-of-Show that addresses the challenges of decentralized multi-concept customization, including concept conflicts resulting from existing single-client LoRA tuning and identity loss during model fusion. Mix-of-Show adopts an embedding-decomposed LoRA (ED-LoRA) for single-client tuning and gradient fusion for the center node to preserve the in-domain essence of single concepts and support theoretically limitless concept fusion. Additionally, we introduce regionally controllable sampling, which extends spatially controllable sampling (e.g., ControlNet and T2I-Adaptor) to address attribute binding and missing object problems in multi-concept sampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mix-of-Show is capable of composing multiple customized concepts with high fidelity, including characters, objects, and scenes