MiewID is feeling tired (a lot !)

[Lucas]

Hi !!

I hope you are well !

In which Wildbook did the issue occur?
Whiskerbook

What is your role on the site? (admin, researcher, etc)
Orgadmin.

What happened?
I noticed for some time (a few days, maybe 1 or 2 weeks ? Difficult to say precisely, but it’s recent) that MiewID was dramatically “OFF”, way less good that it was before. I told myself that it was probably me, but several users also pointed it out to me even though I hadn’t told them about it. So I ran tests, and I can confirm it, there is something wrong happening.

Have you by any chance changed anything in the algorithm or the identification process ?

What did you expect to happen ?
More or less the same effectiveness that we have seen since the very beginning of MiewID.

What are some steps we could take to reproduce the issue?

See some examples :
Example 1 :

• See here the Hotspotter result and the Miew-ID result. The Lynx is MOUSAI Whiskerbook
  This is an easy one and tere are LOTS of pictures of MOUSAI that could have been matched by MiewID.
  
  

Example 2 : maybe a better example : before and after, please see the video (link removed)

Other examples : I can easily give 10 more examples or more, please just ask me to if needed

Please trust me, I am very familiar with the idea that the software isn’t always equally effective and that there is variability, but this is really very different from what we’ve seen all along and there is something not working anymore. You can try to consult matchs from 2 weeks ago or older and send them again, you will see that this is not usual.

Thank you very much for your help,

Lucas

[Anastasia]

Thanks for letting us know! I’ll need more time to look into this.

[Lucas]

Thanks @Anastasia !!

[Anastasia]

Hi @Lucas

Whiskerbook hasn’t been updated in a while and we haven’t been able to reproduce what you saw while we researched this but we’ll continue to monitor for it.

In the meantime, it looks like Hotspotter served as a good backup by making the correct match.

[Lucas]

Hi @Anastasia,

Thanks for your response

I just received another email from a user who questions the recent behavior of MiewID

I was able to refine, the problem definitely started between February 14 and 20 and probably around February 14 or 15 (in France).

Whiskerbook hasn’t been updated, maybe the AI server side have been changed in some way?

Would it help if I gave you some “before/after” examples, [like in this video]((link removed)) ?

[Anastasia]

@Lucas

Whiskerbook hasn’t been updated, maybe the AI server side have been changed in some way?

What I meant was that the MiewID model hasn’t been updated recently, either. We don’t need additional examples at this time.

Feel free to resend images to identification if you don’t feel confident about its initial candidate list or you can defer to the Hotspotter suggestions if the correct match appears there.

[Anastasia]

@Lucas

I just received another email from a user who questions the recent behavior of MiewID

I forgot to mention earlier that if other users come to you with issues you can’t resolve in Whiskerbook, it’s best to direct them to Community for help. In general, this helps us get a better understanding of the scope of a reported issue and prevents any details from getting lost when one person reports on behalf of another.

[Lucas]

@Anastasia

general, this helps us get a better understanding of the scope of a reported issue and prevents any details from getting lost when one person reports on behalf of another.

Hello Anastasia,
It is noted I will do this if there are problems that I cannot reproduce on my side as well.

When there is a problem that I can reproduce, I report it myself to ensure consistent monitoring and management of the problems that our organisation have encountered.

I have a bulk import of a few thousand data to import, I’m putting it on hold while Miew ID is investigated/repaired so as not to have to rerun all the match results afterwards

[Anastasia]

@Lucas

I have a bulk import of a few thousand data to import, I’m putting it on hold while Miew ID is investigated/repaired so as not to have to rerun all the match results afterwards

To clarify, this shouldn’t prevent you from uploading your data. MiewID missed the match but HotSpotter found it. HotSpotter is a trusted backup available for this reason. Are you seeing entire bulk imports where none of the candidates are correct matches? If so, that’s a different problem entirely.

[Lucas]

Hi @Anastasia

Do you have any news on this issue, please ?

I just had a user from our organisation contacting me because the algorithm isn’t working as intended anymore.

Hotspotter can help in some case, but is way less efficient for “hard pictures” than Miew ID.

(Eg from just now with a very well documented individual (Ainthi) :

)

Edit : I will check this but I have a suspicion that MiewID may no longer search for images that have been integrated more than a few months ago and that this could be the cause of the difficulties. I have to check that on a few examples.

[Anastasia]

Can you let that user know they can post their issue in this thread if they have examples to share? We really need to hear directly from each user experiencing this in order to get a better idea of what exactly is causing this.

[Lucas]

Hi @Anastasia ,

I will tell them, but keep in mind they are not experienced users so they will not easily give you the information you need to understand the problem they are facing ([like the video “step by step’”]((link removed)
) showing you one example where the problem is obvious).

That’s why we do “problem solving sessions” directly in french inside our organization and “1 to 1” meetings or phone calls so I can help them with the numerous “not real problems” and report here the real problems that I have actually observed and documented.

I let them know they can post too

[Anastasia]

@Lucas

I will tell them, but keep in mind they are not experienced users so they will not easily give you the information you need to understand the problem they are facing (like the video “step by step’” showing you one example where the problem is obvious).

Don’t worry about that; my job to get to get users the help they need regardless of their technical aptitude!

[Lucas]

Hi @Anastasia

Through testing, I was able to identify what lead to the deterioration of Miew ID results !

It seems that for all new encounters, Miew ID only searches for recently uploaded images and no longer searches for older images (uploaded before february 2025).

Here are some examples:

• Whiskerbook
  => ALL the images displayed were uploaded in February or March 2025 (and are pretty bad), none of the much more relevant earlier images are exposed, while this is a well-documented lynx.

• Here is another one from another very well documented individual:
  Whiskerbook
  

  
  
  => ALL the images displayed were uploaded in February or March 2025 (and are pretty bad), none of the much more relevant earlier images are exposed, while this is a well-documented lynx.

• Remember my example in the first message of this post ? Whiskerbook
  Guess what →
  

  

You can check any Whiskerbook encounter from after mid-February 2025 and see it’s the same.

This also explains the strange behaviour showned on the video I sent you by PM.

Please tell me if I’m not clear enough

[Jerome]

Hello Anastasia,
I am one of the official users (Environnement Department) of the French Lynx network who have actually noticed and reported to Lucas the sharp drop in Miew-ID’s efficiency for almost a month. This is an observation that was made by different people who had not consulted each other and we have all undoubtedly noticed it. Here is an example that jumps out at you, among others: Whiskerbook
I know that Lucas will be able to provide as many examples as you could need.
As he reported it in the previous post, only recently uploaded images picture are considered.
Hotspotter can help in some cases like the one above, but it remains a degraded mode (as far as I know, HotSpotter does not run on bulk imports, nor by default in “report en encounter”, and it turns out to be much less good than MiewID was until recently).
We are currently expanding the use of the application to all French regions within the Department of the Environment; this malfunction constitutes a major difficulty for ongoing research projects.
Thank you for your help, we really appreciate Miew-ID and miss its efficiency !

[Anastasia]

Thank you both! I’ll follow up if I have more questions or have an update to share.

[Anastasia]

Thanks to your detailed examples, we were able to consistently recreate the issue during today’s testing.

We rebuilt MiewID’s embeddings cache and additional testing shows that the correct match candidate is now appearing in the top rankings.

Feel free to re-run matches in MiewID to verify that it’s behaving correctly and let us know if it’s not.

[Lucas]

Thank you very much @Anastasia !

I did a first test and it seems to be totally fixed, it’s really great!!!

Very happy to have MiewID back, thank you !

Before :

After :

[Jerome]

Hello Anastasia,

Thank you for this very good news !

This issue was of great concern to us given our current development with numerous government departments and non-governmental organizations.

We are very pleased to see that our alert was acknowledged and quickly addressed.

It is very important for us to see your responsiveness and professionalism.
This gives us confidence in our choice to collaborate with your organization for the future.