The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into transportation planning has the potential to revolutionize tasks such as demand forecasting, infrastructure design, policy evaluation, and traffic simulation. However, there is a critical need for a systematic framework to guide the adoption of GenAI in this interdisciplinary domain. In this survey, we, a multidisciplinary team of researchers spanning computer science and transportation engineering, present the first comprehensive framework for leveraging GenAI in transportation planning. Specifically, we introduce a new taxonomy that categorizes existing applications and methodologies into two perspectives: transportation planning tasks and computational techniques. From the transportation planning perspective, we examine the role of GenAI in automating descriptive, predictive, generative, simulation, and explainable tasks to enhance mobility systems. From the computational perspective, we detail advancements in data preparation, domain-specific fine-tuning, and inference strategies, such as retrieval-augmented generation and zero-shot learning tailored to transportation applications. Additionally, we address critical challenges, including data scarcity, explainability, bias mitigation, and the development of domain-specific evaluation frameworks that align with transportation goals like sustainability, equity, and system efficiency. This survey aims to bridge the gap between traditional transportation planning methodologies and modern AI techniques, fostering collaboration and innovation. By addressing these challenges and opportunities, we seek to inspire future research that ensures ethical, equitable, and impactful use of generative AI in transportation planning.

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in generating high-quality images but also raise people's concerns about generating harmful or misleading content. While extensive approaches have been proposed to erase unwanted concepts without requiring retraining from scratch, they inadvertently degrade performance on normal generation tasks. In this work, we propose Interpret then Deactivate (ItD), a novel framework to enable precise concept removal in T2I diffusion models while preserving overall performance. ItD first employs a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to interpret each concept as a combination of multiple features. By permanently deactivating the specific features associated with target concepts, we repurpose SAE as a zero-shot classifier that identifies whether the input prompt includes target concepts, allowing selective concept erasure in diffusion models. Moreover, we demonstrate that ItD can be easily extended to erase multiple concepts without requiring further training. Comprehensive experiments across celebrity identities, artistic styles, and explicit content demonstrate ItD's effectiveness in eliminating targeted concepts without interfering with normal concept generation. Additionally, ItD is also robust against adversarial prompts designed to circumvent content filters. Code is available at: https://github.com/NANSirun/Interpret-then-deactivate.

The rapid advancement of conversational agents, particularly chatbots powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), poses a significant risk of social engineering (SE) attacks on social media platforms. SE detection in multi-turn, chat-based interactions is considerably more complex than single-instance detection due to the dynamic nature of these conversations. A critical factor in mitigating this threat is understanding the mechanisms through which SE attacks operate, specifically how attackers exploit vulnerabilities and how victims' personality traits contribute to their susceptibility. In this work, we propose an LLM-agentic framework, SE-VSim, to simulate SE attack mechanisms by generating multi-turn conversations. We model victim agents with varying personality traits to assess how psychological profiles influence susceptibility to manipulation. Using a dataset of over 1000 simulated conversations, we examine attack scenarios in which adversaries, posing as recruiters, funding agencies, and journalists, attempt to extract sensitive information. Based on this analysis, we present a proof of concept, SE-OmniGuard, to offer personalized protection to users by leveraging prior knowledge of the victims personality, evaluating attack strategies, and monitoring information exchanges in conversations to identify potential SE attempts.

Identifying the Markov properties or conditional independencies of a collection of random variables is a fundamental task in statistics for modeling and inference. Existing approaches often learn the structure of a probabilistic graphical model, which encodes these dependencies, by assuming that the variables follow a distribution with a simple parametric form. Moreover, the computational cost of many algorithms scales poorly for high-dimensional distributions, as they need to estimate all the edges in the graph simultaneously. In this work, we propose a scalable algorithm to infer the conditional independence relationships of each variable by exploiting the local Markov property. The proposed method, named Localized Sparsity Identification for Non-Gaussian Distributions (L-SING), estimates the graph by using flexible classes of transport maps to represent the conditional distribution for each variable. We show that L-SING includes existing approaches, such as neighborhood selection with Lasso, as a special case. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in both Gaussian and non-Gaussian settings by comparing it to existing methods. Lastly, we show the scalability of the proposed approach by applying it to high-dimensional non-Gaussian examples, including a biological dataset with more than 150 variables.

Diffusion language models offer unique benefits over autoregressive models due to their potential for parallelized generation and controllability, yet they lag in likelihood modeling and are limited to fixed-length generation. In this work, we introduce a class of block diffusion language models that interpolate between discrete denoising diffusion and autoregressive models. Block diffusion overcomes key limitations of both approaches by supporting flexible-length generation and improving inference efficiency with KV caching and parallel token sampling. We propose a recipe for building effective block diffusion models that includes an efficient training algorithm, estimators of gradient variance, and data-driven noise schedules to minimize the variance. Block diffusion sets a new state-of-the-art performance among diffusion models on language modeling benchmarks and enables generation of arbitrary-length sequences. We provide the code, along with the model weights and blog post on the project page: https://m-arriola.com/bd3lms/

This paper introduces a framework for human swarm interaction studies that measures situation awareness in dynamic environments. A tablet-based interface was developed for a user study by implementing the concepts introduced in the framework, where operators guided a robotic swarm in a single-target search task, marking hazardous cells unknown to the swarm. Both subjective and objective situation awareness measures were used, with task performance evaluated based on how close the robots were to the target. The framework enabled a structured investigation of the role of situation awareness in human swarm interaction, leading to key findings such as improved task performance across attempts, showing the interface was learnable, centroid active robot position proved to be a useful task performance metric for assessing situation awareness, perception and projection played a key role in task performance, highlighting their importance in interface design and both subjective and objective situation awareness influenced task performance, emphasizing the need for interfaces that support both. These findings validate our framework as a structured approach for integrating situation awareness concepts into human swarm interaction studies, offering a systematic way to assess situation awareness and task performance. The framework can be applied to other swarming studies to evaluate interface learnability, identify meaningful task performance metrics, and refine interface designs to enhance situation awareness, ultimately improving human swarm interaction in dynamic environments.

With the widespread consumption of AI-generated content, there has been an increased focus on developing automated tools to verify the factual accuracy of such content. However, prior research and tools developed for fact verification treat it as a binary classification or a linear regression problem. Although this is a useful mechanism as part of automatic guardrails in systems, we argue that such tools lack transparency in the prediction reasoning and diversity in source evidence to provide a trustworthy user experience. We develop Facts&Evidence - an interactive and transparent tool for user-driven verification of complex text. The tool facilitates the intricate decision-making involved in fact-verification, presenting its users a breakdown of complex input texts to visualize the credibility of individual claims along with an explanation of model decisions and attribution to multiple, diverse evidence sources. Facts&Evidence aims to empower consumers of machine-generated text and give them agency to understand, verify, selectively trust and use such text.

Accurately analyzing data while preserving individual privacy is a fundamental challenge in statistical inference. Since its formulation nearly two decades ago, Differential Privacy (DP) [DMNS06] has emerged as the leading framework for privacy-preserving data analysis, providing strong mathematical privacy guarantees and gaining adoption by major entities such as the U.S. Census Bureau, Amazon [Ama24], Google [EPK14], Microsoft [DKY17], and Apple [Dif17; TVVKFSD17]. Unfortunately, DP guarantees often come at the cost of increased data requirements or computational resources, which has limited the widespread adoption of differential privacy in spite of its theoretical appeal. To address this issue, a recent line of work has investigated whether access to even small amounts of additional public data could help mitigate this loss of performance. Promising results for various tasks have been shown, both experimentally [KST20; LLHR24; BZHZK24; DORKSF24] and theoretically [BKS22; BBCKS23]. The use of additional auxiliary information is very enticing, as such access is available in many real-world applications: for example, hospitals handling sensitive patient data might leverage public datasets, records from different periods or locations, or synthetic data generated by machine learning models to improve analysis. Similarly, medical or socio-econonomic studies focusing on a minority or protected group can leverage statistical data from the overall population. However, integrating public data introduces its own challenges, as it often lacks guarantees regarding its accuracy or relevance to private datasets.

The capability of effectively moving on complex terrains such as sand and gravel can empower our robots to robustly operate in outdoor environments, and assist with critical tasks such as environment monitoring, search-and-rescue, and supply delivery. Inspired by the Mount Lyell salamander's ability to curl its body into a loop and effectively roll down {\Revision hill slopes}, in this study we develop a sand-rolling robot and investigate how its locomotion performance is governed by the shape of its body. We experimentally tested three different body shapes: Hexagon, Quadrilateral, and Triangle. We found that Hexagon and Triangle can achieve a faster rolling speed on sand, but exhibited more frequent failures of getting stuck. Analysis of the interaction between robot and sand revealed the failure mechanism: the deformation of the sand produced a local ``sand incline'' underneath robot contact segments, increasing the effective region of supporting polygon (ERSP) and preventing the robot from shifting its center of mass (CoM) outside the ERSP to produce sustainable rolling. Based on this mechanism, a highly-simplified model successfully captured the critical body pitch for each rolling shape to produce sustained rolling on sand, and informed design adaptations that mitigated the locomotion failures and improved robot speed by more than 200$\%$. Our results provide insights into how locomotors can utilize different morphological features to achieve robust rolling motion across deformable substrates.

Recently there has been growing interest in the use of aerial and satellite map data for autonomous vehicles, primarily due to its potential for significant cost reduction and enhanced scalability. Despite the advantages, aerial data also comes with challenges such as a sensor-modality gap and a viewpoint difference gap. Learned localization methods have shown promise for overcoming these challenges to provide precise metric localization for autonomous vehicles. Most learned localization methods rely on coarsely aligned ground truth, or implicit consistency-based methods to learn the localization task -- however, in this paper we find that improving the alignment between aerial data and autonomous vehicle sensor data at training time is critical to the performance of a learning-based localization system. We compare two data alignment methods using a factor graph framework and, using these methods, we then evaluate the effects of closely aligned ground truth on learned localization accuracy through ablation studies. Finally, we evaluate a learned localization system using the data alignment methods on a comprehensive (1600km) autonomous vehicle dataset and demonstrate localization error below 0.3m and 0.5$^{\circ}$ sufficient for autonomous vehicle applications.