Machine Learning and data mining techniques (i.e. supervised and unsupervised techniques) are used across domains to detect user safety violations. Examples include classifiers used to detect whether an email is spam or a web-page is requesting bank login information. However, existing ML/DM classifiers are limited in their ability to understand natural languages w.r.t the context and nuances. The aforementioned challenges are overcome with the arrival of Gen-AI techniques, along with their inherent ability w.r.t translation between languages, fine-tuning between various tasks and domains. In this manuscript, we provide a comprehensive overview of the various work done while using Gen-AI techniques w.r.t user safety. In particular, we first provide the various domains (e.g. phishing, malware, content moderation, counterfeit, physical safety) across which Gen-AI techniques have been applied. Next, we provide how Gen-AI techniques can be used in conjunction with various data modalities i.e. text, images, videos, audio, executable binaries to detect violations of user-safety. Further, also provide an overview of how Gen-AI techniques can be used in an adversarial setting. We believe that this work represents the first summarization of Gen-AI techniques for user-safety.

Graphic designs are an effective medium for visual communication. They range from greeting cards to corporate flyers and beyond. Off-late, machine learning techniques are able to generate such designs, which accelerates the rate of content production. An automated way of evaluating their quality becomes critical. Towards this end, we introduce Design-o-meter, a data-driven methodology to quantify the goodness of graphic designs. Further, our approach can suggest modifications to these designs to improve its visual appeal. To the best of our knowledge, Design-o-meter is the first approach that scores and refines designs in a unified framework despite the inherent subjectivity and ambiguity of the setting. Our exhaustive quantitative and qualitative analysis of our approach against baselines adapted for the task (including recent Multimodal LLM-based approaches) brings out the efficacy of our methodology. We hope our work will usher more interest in this important and pragmatic problem setting.

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) aims to automatically analyze spatiotemporal patterns in surveillance videos collected from open spaces to detect anomalous events that may cause harm without physical contact. However, vision-based surveillance systems such as closed-circuit television often capture personally identifiable information. The lack of transparency and interpretability in video transmission and usage raises public concerns about privacy and ethics, limiting the real-world application of VAD. Recently, researchers have focused on privacy concerns in VAD by conducting systematic studies from various perspectives including data, features, and systems, making Privacy-Preserving Video Anomaly Detection (P2VAD) a hotspot in the AI community. However, current research in P2VAD is fragmented, and prior reviews have mostly focused on methods using RGB sequences, overlooking privacy leakage and appearance bias considerations. To address this gap, this article systematically reviews the progress of P2VAD for the first time, defining its scope and providing an intuitive taxonomy. We outline the basic assumptions, learning frameworks, and optimization objectives of various approaches, analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and potential correlations. Additionally, we provide open access to research resources such as benchmark datasets and available code. Finally, we discuss key challenges and future opportunities from the perspectives of AI development and P2VAD deployment, aiming to guide future work in the field.

Link prediction is crucial for understanding complex networks but traditional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) often rely on random negative sampling, leading to suboptimal performance. This paper introduces Fuzzy Graph Attention Networks (FGAT), a novel approach integrating fuzzy rough sets for dynamic negative sampling and enhanced node feature aggregation. Fuzzy Negative Sampling (FNS) systematically selects high-quality negative edges based on fuzzy similarities, improving training efficiency. FGAT layer incorporates fuzzy rough set principles, enabling robust and discriminative node representations. Experiments on two research collaboration networks demonstrate FGAT's superior link prediction accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by leveraging the power of fuzzy rough sets for effective negative sampling and node feature learning.

Recent advancements in machine learning, particularly through deep learning architectures like PointNet, have transformed the processing of three-dimensional (3D) point clouds, significantly improving 3D object classification and segmentation tasks. While 3D point clouds provide detailed spatial information, spatio-temporal signals introduce a dynamic element that accounts for changes over time. However, applying deep learning techniques to spatio-temporal signals and deploying them on edge devices presents challenges, including real-time processing, memory capacity, and power consumption. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel approach that combines PointNet's feature extraction with the in-memory computing capabilities and energy efficiency of neuromorphic systems for spatio-temporal signal recognition. The proposed method consists of a two-stage process: in the first stage, PointNet extracts features from the spatio-temporal signals, which are then stored in non-volatile memristor crossbar arrays. In the second stage, these features are processed by a single-layer spiking neural encoder-decoder that employs the Locally Competitive Algorithm (LCA) for efficient encoding and classification. This work integrates the strengths of both PointNet and LCA, enhancing computational efficiency and energy performance on edge devices. PointLCA-Net achieves high recognition accuracy for spatio-temporal data with substantially lower energy burden during both inference and training than comparable approaches, thus advancing the deployment of advanced neural architectures in energy-constrained environments.

Scientific progress depends on researchers' ability to synthesize the growing body of literature. Can large language models (LMs) assist scientists in this task? We introduce OpenScholar, a specialized retrieval-augmented LM that answers scientific queries by identifying relevant passages from 45 million open-access papers and synthesizing citation-backed responses. To evaluate OpenScholar, we develop ScholarQABench, the first large-scale multi-domain benchmark for literature search, comprising 2,967 expert-written queries and 208 long-form answers across computer science, physics, neuroscience, and biomedicine. On ScholarQABench, OpenScholar-8B outperforms GPT-4o by 5% and PaperQA2 by 7% in correctness, despite being a smaller, open model. While GPT4o hallucinates citations 78 to 90% of the time, OpenScholar achieves citation accuracy on par with human experts. OpenScholar's datastore, retriever, and self-feedback inference loop also improves off-the-shelf LMs: for instance, OpenScholar-GPT4o improves GPT-4o's correctness by 12%. In human evaluations, experts preferred OpenScholar-8B and OpenScholar-GPT4o responses over expert-written ones 51% and 70% of the time, respectively, compared to GPT4o's 32%. We open-source all of our code, models, datastore, data and a public demo.

Behavior Trees (BTs) are high-level controllers that are useful in a variety of planning tasks and are gaining traction in robotic mission planning. As they gain popularity in safety-critical domains, it is important to formalize their syntax and semantics, as well as verify properties for them. In this paper, we formalize a class of BTs we call Stateful Behavior Trees (SBTs) that have auxiliary variables and operate in an environment that can change over time. SBTs have access to persistent shared memory (often known as a blackboard) that keeps track of these auxiliary variables. We demonstrate that SBTs are equivalent in computational power to Turing Machines when the blackboard can store mathematical (i.e., unbounded) integers. We further identify syntactic assumptions where SBTs have computational power equivalent to finite state automata, specifically where the auxiliary variables are of finitary types. We present a domain specific language (DSL) for writing SBTs and adapt the tool BehaVerify for use with this DSL. This new DSL in BehaVerify supports interfacing with popular BT libraries in Python, and also provides generation of Haskell code and nuXmv models, the latter of which is used for model checking temporal logic specifications for the SBTs. We include examples and scalability results where BehaVerify outperforms another verification tool by a factor of 100.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and multimodal learning has transformed digital content creation and manipulation. Traditional visual editing tools require significant expertise, limiting accessibility. Recent strides in instruction-based editing have enabled intuitive interaction with visual content, using natural language as a bridge between user intent and complex editing operations. This survey provides an overview of these techniques, focusing on how LLMs and multimodal models empower users to achieve precise visual modifications without deep technical knowledge. By synthesizing over 100 publications, we explore methods from generative adversarial networks to diffusion models, examining multimodal integration for fine-grained content control. We discuss practical applications across domains such as fashion, 3D scene manipulation, and video synthesis, highlighting increased accessibility and alignment with human intuition. Our survey compares existing literature, emphasizing LLM-empowered editing, and identifies key challenges to stimulate further research. We aim to democratize powerful visual editing across various industries, from entertainment to education. Interested readers are encouraged to access our repository at https://github.com/tamlhp/awesome-instruction-editing.

Detecting and tracking emerging trends and weak signals in large, evolving text corpora is vital for applications such as monitoring scientific literature, managing brand reputation, surveilling critical infrastructure and more generally to any kind of text-based event detection. Existing solutions often fail to capture the nuanced context or dynamically track evolving patterns over time. BERTrend, a novel method, addresses these limitations using neural topic modeling in an online setting. It introduces a new metric to quantify topic popularity over time by considering both the number of documents and update frequency. This metric classifies topics as noise, weak, or strong signals, flagging emerging, rapidly growing topics for further investigation. Experimentation on two large real-world datasets demonstrates BERTrend's ability to accurately detect and track meaningful weak signals while filtering out noise, offering a comprehensive solution for monitoring emerging trends in large-scale, evolving text corpora. The method can also be used for retrospective analysis of past events. In addition, the use of Large Language Models together with BERTrend offers efficient means for the interpretability of trends of events.

Mobile health has the potential to revolutionize health care delivery and patient engagement. In this work, we discuss how integrating Artificial Intelligence into digital health applications-focused on supply chain, patient management, and capacity building, among other use cases-can improve the health system and public health performance. We present an Artificial Intelligence and Reinforcement Learning platform that allows the delivery of adaptive interventions whose impact can be optimized through experimentation and real-time monitoring. The system can integrate multiple data sources and digital health applications. The flexibility of this platform to connect to various mobile health applications and digital devices and send personalized recommendations based on past data and predictions can significantly improve the impact of digital tools on health system outcomes. The potential for resource-poor settings, where the impact of this approach on health outcomes could be more decisive, is discussed specifically. This framework is, however, similarly applicable to improving efficiency in health systems where scarcity is not an issue.