Creative and disruptive insights (CDIs), such as the development of the theory of relativity, have punctuated human history, marking pivotal shifts in our intellectual trajectory. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked debates over whether state of the art models possess the capacity to generate CDIs. We argue that the ability to create CDIs should be regarded as a significant feature of machine superintelligence (SI).To this end, we propose a practical test to evaluate whether an approach to AI targeting SI can yield novel insights of this kind. We propose the Einstein test: given the data available prior to the emergence of a known CDI, can an AI independently reproduce that insight (or one that is formally equivalent)? By achieving such a milestone, a machine can be considered to at least match humanity's past top intellectual achievements, and therefore to have the potential to surpass them.

So much of this year felt like a fever dream: The attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Which is why, this year, I'm leaning into my nerdish tendencies and rounding up some good, interesting, or inspiring news stories from the science world--promising discoveries, exciting new data, historic events, and unsung heroes. In the hope of providing relief from the hell that has been 2024, here's a non-comprehensive list of the year's coolest science stories, both big and small: Wildlife filmmaker Carlos Gauna and University of California, Riverside, PhD student Phillip Sternes spotted what appears to be a baby great white shark off the coast of California last year. In January, the team published the photos in the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes. "Where white sharks give birth is one of the holy grails of shark science. No one has ever been able to pinpoint where they are born, nor has anyone seen a newborn baby shark alive," Gauna said in a UC Riverside press release.

The birth of ChatGPT brought a collection of anxieties regarding how large language models allow users to quickly subvert processes that once required human time, effort, passion, and understanding. And further, the tech sector's often stormy relationship with regulation and ethical oversight have left many fearful for a future where artificial intelligence replaces humans at work and stymies human creativity. While much of this alarm is well founded, we should also consider the possibility that human creativity can blossom in the age of AI. In 2025, we will start to see this manifest in our collective cultural response to technology. To examine how culture and creativity might adapt to the age of AI, we'll use hip-hop as an example.

Creativity is the ability to produce novel, useful, and surprising ideas, and has been widely studied as a crucial aspect of human cognition. Machine creativity on the other hand has been a long-standing challenge. With the rise of advanced generative AI, there has been renewed interest and debate regarding AI's creative capabilities. Therefore, it is imperative to revisit the state of creativity in AI and identify key progresses and remaining challenges. In this work, we survey leading works studying the creative capabilities of AI systems, focusing on creative problem-solving, linguistic, artistic, and scientific creativity. Our review suggests that while the latest AI models are largely capable of producing linguistically and artistically creative outputs such as poems, images, and musical pieces, they struggle with tasks that require creative problem-solving, abstract thinking and compositionality and their generations suffer from a lack of diversity, originality, long-range incoherence and hallucinations. We also discuss key questions concerning copyright and authorship issues with generative models. Furthermore, we highlight the need for a comprehensive evaluation of creativity that is process-driven and considers several dimensions of creativity. Finally, we propose future research directions to improve the creativity of AI outputs, drawing inspiration from cognitive science and psychology.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of generating creative outputs are reshaping our understanding of creativity. This shift presents an opportunity for creativity researchers to reevaluate the key components of the creative process. In particular, the advanced capabilities of AI underscore the importance of studying the internal processes of creativity. This paper explores the neurobiological machinery that underlies these internal processes and describes the experiential component of creativity. It is concluded that although the products of artificial and human creativity can be similar, the internal processes are different. The paper also discusses how AI may negatively affect the internal processes of human creativity, such as the development of skills, the integration of knowledge, and the diversity of ideas.

Domain-invariant representation learning is a powerful method for domain generalization. Previous approaches face challenges such as high computational demands, training instability, and limited effectiveness with high-dimensional data, potentially leading to the loss of valuable features. To address these issues, we hypothesize that an ideal generalized representation should exhibit similar pattern responses within the same channel across cross-domain images. Based on this hypothesis, we use deep features from the source domain as queries, and deep features from the generated domain as keys and values. Through a cross-channel attention mechanism, the original deep features are reconstructed into robust regularization representations, forming an explicit constraint that guides the model to learn domain-invariant representations. Additionally, style augmentation is another common method. However, existing methods typically generate new styles through convex combinations of source domains, which limits the diversity of training samples by confining the generated styles to the original distribution. To overcome this limitation, we propose an Adaptive Feature Blending (AFB) method that generates out-of-distribution samples while exploring the in-distribution space, significantly expanding the domain range. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve superior performance on two standard domain generalization benchmarks for medical image segmentation.

Adversarial Training (AT) is one of the most effective methods to enhance the robustness of DNNs. However, existing AT methods suffer from an inherent trade-off between adversarial robustness and clean accuracy, which seriously hinders their real-world deployment. While this problem has been widely studied within the current AT paradigm, existing AT methods still typically experience a reduction in clean accuracy by over 10% to date, without significant improvements in robustness compared with simple baselines like PGD-AT. This inherent trade-off raises a question: whether the current AT paradigm, which assumes to learn the corresponding benign and adversarial samples as the same class, inappropriately combines clean and robust objectives that may be essentially inconsistent. In this work, we surprisingly reveal that up to 40% of CIFAR-10 adversarial samples always fail to satisfy such an assumption across various AT methods and robust models, explicitly indicating the improvement room for the current AT paradigm. Accordingly, to relax the tension between clean and robust learning derived from this overstrict assumption, we propose a new AT paradigm by introducing an additional dummy class for each original class, aiming to accommodate the hard adversarial samples with shifted distribution after perturbation. The robustness w.r.t. these adversarial samples can be achieved by runtime recovery from the predicted dummy classes to their corresponding original ones, eliminating the compromise with clean learning. Building on this new paradigm, we propose a novel plug-and-play AT technology named DUmmy Classes-based Adversarial Training (DUCAT). Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet demonstrate that the DUCAT concurrently improves clean accuracy and adversarial robustness compared with state-of-the-art benchmarks, effectively breaking the existing inherent trade-off.

This study presents a theory-inspired visual narrative generative system that integrates conceptual principles-comic authoring idioms-with generative and language models to enhance the comic creation process. Our system combines human creativity with AI models to support parts of the generative process, providing a collaborative platform for creating comic content. These comic-authoring idioms, derived from prior human-created image sequences, serve as guidelines for crafting and refining storytelling. The system translates these principles into system layers that facilitate comic creation through sequential decision-making, addressing narrative elements such as panel composition, story tension changes, and panel transitions. Key contributions include integrating machine learning models into the human-AI cooperative comic generation process, deploying abstract narrative theories into AI-driven comic creation, and a customizable tool for narrative-driven image sequences. This approach improves narrative elements in generated image sequences and engages human creativity in an AI-generative process of comics. We open-source the code at https://github.com/RimiChen/Collaborative_Comic_Generation.

Human intelligence, the most evident and accessible form of source of reasoning, hosted by biological hardware, has evolved and been refined over thousands of years, positioning itself today to create new artificial forms and preparing to self--design their evolutionary path forward. Beginning with the advent of foundation models, the rate at which human and artificial intelligence interact with each other has surpassed any anticipated quantitative figures. The close engagement led to both bits of intelligence to be impacted in various ways, which naturally resulted in complex confluences that warrant close scrutiny. In the sequel, we shall explore the interplay between human and machine intelligence, focusing on the crucial role humans play in developing ethical, responsible, and robust intelligent systems. We slightly delve into interesting aspects of implementation inspired by the mechanisms underlying neuroscience and human cognition. Additionally, we propose future perspectives, capitalizing on the advantages of symbiotic designs to suggest a human-centered direction for next-generation AI development. We finalize this evolving document with a few thoughts and open questions yet to be addressed by the broader community.