Meta Research

We describe Facebook’s development of WW, its cyber-cyber digital twin, and, in particular, the way it uses hybrid artificial intelligence techniques for behavioral and structural imitation. WW is a simulation of Facebook user behavior on the real Facebook platform, which Facebook uses to test and optimize its products. There are inherently many foundational scientific challenges that come to the fore when attempting to safely, reliably and effectively simulate user behaviors at scale. This paper outlines some existing practical and scientific work at Facebook, together with open problems and challenges for this research agenda, which lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and software engineering.