The Storm Chaser Building a Tornado Taxonomy
A storm chaser has 4,000 photos from a decade of chasing, everything dumped into folders by date. She wants to find every wedge tornado versus every rope tornado without having gone through and tagged them at the time. She creates two Signals: feeds one 15 photos of wedge tornados as positives and a mix of clear sky and rope tornados as negatives, does the same for rope tornados. Now the embedding space is reshaped around her own visual vocabulary, and she can type “wedge tornado at sunset” and get compositional results that combine her trained concept with a natural language query the base model was never taught to recognize. Signals aren't a tag, they're a reshaping of how the whole library gets searched from that point on.