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Europe loosens reins on AI – and US takes them off

The Guardian

EU and US unshackle regulations in quest for growth, and is the AI bubble about to burst? In tech, the European Union is deregulating artificial intelligence; the United States is going even further. The AI bubble has not popped, thanks to Nvidia's astronomical quarterly earnings, but fears persist. And Meta has avoided a breakup for a similar reason as Google. The hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on AI are overwhelming Europe's commitment to digital privacy and stringent tech regulation.


Reports of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's 2025 Spring Symposium Series

Interactive AI Magazine

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's 2025 Spring Symposium Series was held in Burmingame, California, March 31-April 2, 2025. There were eight symposia in the spring program: AI for Engineering and Scientific Discoveries, AI for Health Symposium: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Revolutionize Healthcare, Current and Future Varieties of Human-AI Collaboration, GenAI@Edge: Empowering Generative AI at the Edge, Human-Compatible AI for Well-being: Harnessing Potential of GenAI for AI-Powered Science, Machine Learning and Knowledge Engineering for Trustworthy Multimodal and Generative AI, Symposium on Child-AI Interaction in the Era of Foundation Models, Towards Agentic AI for Science: Hypothesis Generation, Comprehension, Quantification, and Validation. This report contains summaries of the workshops, which were submitted by some, but not all, of the workshop chairs. This symposium aims to advance and diversify the application of AI in emerging engineering and scientific discovery domains. Inspired by progress in large language models, generative AI, and AI-assisted scientific computing, we seek to foster new collaborations between industry and academia to tackle challenging problems in materials, manufacturing, and life sciences. We also plan to explore new directions in human-machine interaction for accelerating knowledge discovery and address related ethical considerations. Through invited speakers, panel discussions, and contributions from researchers with cross-disciplinary expertise, we hoped to cultivate partnerships that drive transformative advances in both AI and scientific research. No formal report was filed by the organizers for this symposium.



Urban In-Context Learning: Bridging Pretraining and Inference through Masked Diffusion for Urban Profiling

Zhang, Ruixing, Wang, Bo, Zhu, Tongyu, Sun, Leilei, Lv, Weifeng

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Urban profiling aims to predict urban profiles in unknown regions and plays a critical role in economic and social censuses. Existing approaches typically follow a two-stage paradigm: first, learning representations of urban areas; second, performing downstream prediction via linear probing, which originates from the BERT era. Inspired by the development of GPT style models, recent studies have shown that novel self-supervised pretraining schemes can endow models with direct applicability to downstream tasks, thereby eliminating the need for task-specific fine-tuning. This is largely because GPT unifies the form of pretraining and inference through next-token prediction. However, urban data exhibit structural characteristics that differ fundamentally from language, making it challenging to design a one-stage model that unifies both pretraining and inference. In this work, we propose Urban In-Context Learning, a framework that unifies pretraining and inference via a masked autoencoding process over urban regions. To capture the distribution of urban profiles, we introduce the Urban Masked Diffusion Transformer, which enables each region' s prediction to be represented as a distribution rather than a deterministic value. Furthermore, to stabilize diffusion training, we propose the Urban Representation Alignment Mechanism, which regularizes the model's intermediate features by aligning them with those from classical urban profiling methods. Extensive experiments on three indicators across two cities demonstrate that our one-stage method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art two-stage approaches. Ablation studies and case studies further validate the effectiveness of each proposed module, particularly the use of diffusion modeling.


A Systematic Review of Human-AI Co-Creativity

Singh, Saloni, Hindriks, Koen, Heylen, Dirk, Baraka, Kim

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The co creativity community is making significant progress in developing more sophisticated and tailored systems to support and enhance human creativity. Design considerations from prior work can serve as a valuable and efficient foundation for future systems. To support this effort, we conducted a systematic literature review of 62 papers on co-creative systems. These papers cover a diverse range of applications, including visual arts, design, and writing, where the AI acts not just as a tool but as an active collaborator in the creative process. From this review, we identified several key dimensions relevant to system design: phase of the creative process, creative task, proactive behavior of the system, user control, system embodiment, and AI model type. Our findings suggest that systems offering high user control lead to greater satisfaction, trust, and a stronger sense of ownership over creative outcomes. Furthermore, proactive systems, when adaptive and context sensitive, can enhance collaboration. We also extracted 24 design considerations, highlighting the value of encouraging users to externalize their thoughts and of increasing the system's social presence and transparency to foster trust. Despite recent advancements, important gaps remain, such as limited support for early creative phases like problem clarification, and challenges related to user adaptation to AI systems.


CRESSim-MPM: A Material Point Method Library for Surgical Soft Body Simulation with Cutting and Suturing

Ou, Yafei, Tavakoli, Mahdi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A number of recent studies have focused on developing surgical simulation platforms to train machine learning (ML) agents or models with synthetic data for surgical assistance. While existing platforms excel at tasks such as rigid body manipulation and soft body deformation, they struggle to simulate more complex soft body behaviors like cutting and suturing. A key challenge lies in modeling soft body fracture and splitting using the finite-element method (FEM), which is the predominant approach in current platforms. Additionally, the two-way suture needle/thread contact inside a soft body is further complicated when using FEM. In this work, we use the material point method (MPM) for such challenging simulations and propose new rigid geometries and soft-rigid contact methods specifically designed for them. We introduce CRESSim-MPM, a GPU-accelerated MPM library that integrates multiple MPM solvers and incorporates surgical geometries for cutting and suturing, serving as a specialized physics engine for surgical applications. It is further integrated into Unity, requiring minimal modifications to existing projects for soft body simulation. We demonstrate the simulator's capabilities in real-time simulation of cutting and suturing on soft tissue and provide an initial performance evaluation of different MPM solvers when simulating varying numbers of particles.


Enhancing Transformer with GNN Structural Knowledge via Distillation: A Novel Approach

Duan, Zhihua, Wang, Jialin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--Integrating the structural inductive biases of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with the global contextual modeling capabilities of Transformers represents a pivotal challenge in graph representation learning. While GNNs excel at capturing localized topological patterns through message-passing mechanisms, their inherent limitations in modeling long-range dependencies and parallelizability hinder their deployment in large-scale scenarios. Conversely, Transformers leverage self-attention mechanisms to achieve global receptive fields but struggle to inherit the intrinsic graph structural priors of GNNs. This paper proposes a novel knowledge distillation framework that systematically transfers multiscale structural knowledge from GNN teacher models to Transformer student models, offering a new perspective on addressing the critical challenges in cross-architectural distillation. This work establishes a new paradigm for inheriting graph structural biases in Transformer architectures, with broad application prospects.


Prompt-Based Monte Carlo Tree Search for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Models

Duan, Zhihua, Wang, Jialin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the rapid development of large models in the field of artificial intelligence, how to enhance their application capabilities in handling complex problems in the field of scientific research remains a challenging problem to be solved. This study proposes an improved Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method based on prompt words. In the simulation search stage, it introduces dynamic adjustment of exploration parameters and adaptive selection strategies, which can better balance exploration and exploitation, thereby reducing the hallucination phenomenon. This paper takes the four subsets of the SciEval dataset as the test objects, and compares the Glm-4-flash+Improved MCTS method with the methods of several existing models. The results show that the Improved MCTS method performs better, providing new ideas and methods for the application of large models in the field of scientific research.


Research on the Application of Spark Streaming Real-Time Data Analysis System and large language model Intelligent Agents

Wang, Jialin, Duan, Zhihua

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study explores the integration of Agent AI with LangGraph to enhance real-time data analysis systems in big data environments. The proposed framework overcomes limitations of static workflows, inefficient stateful computations, and lack of human intervention by leveraging LangGraph's graph-based workflow construction and dynamic decision-making capabilities. LangGraph allows large language models (LLMs) to dynamically determine control flows, invoke tools, and assess the necessity of further actions, improving flexibility and efficiency. The system architecture incorporates Apache Spark Streaming, Kafka, and LangGraph to create a high-performance sentiment analysis system. LangGraph's capabilities include precise state management, dynamic workflow construction, and robust memory checkpointing, enabling seamless multi-turn interactions and context retention. Human-in-the-loop mechanisms are integrated to refine sentiment analysis, particularly in ambiguous or high-stakes scenarios, ensuring greater reliability and contextual relevance. Key features such as real-time state streaming, debugging via LangGraph Studio, and efficient handling of large-scale data streams make this framework ideal for adaptive decision-making. Experimental results confirm the system's ability to classify inquiries, detect sentiment trends, and escalate complex issues for manual review, demonstrating a synergistic blend of LLM capabilities and human oversight. This work presents a scalable, adaptable, and reliable solution for real-time sentiment analysis and decision-making, advancing the use of Agent AI and LangGraph in big data applications.