Compared to classical machine learning (ML) models, generative models offer a new usage paradigm where (i) a single model can be used for many different tasks out-of-the-box; (ii) users interact with this model over a series of natural language prompts; and (iii) the model is ideally evaluated on binary user satisfaction with respect to model outputs. Given these characteristics, we explore the problem of how developers of new generative AI software can release and price their technology. We first develop a comparison of two different models for a specific task with respect to user cost-effectiveness. We then model the pricing problem of generative AI software as a game between two different companies who sequentially release their models before users choose their preferred model for each task. Here, the price optimization problem becomes piecewise continuous where the companies must choose a subset of the tasks on which to be cost-effective and forgo revenue for the remaining tasks. In particular, we reveal the value of market information by showing that a company who deploys later after knowing their competitor's price can always secure cost-effectiveness on at least one task, whereas the company who is the first-to-market must price their model in a way that incentivizes higher prices from the latecomer in order to gain revenue. Most importantly, we find that if the different tasks are sufficiently similar, the first-to-market model may become cost-ineffective on all tasks regardless of how this technology is priced.

Diffusion-based text-to-video (T2V) models have achieved significant success but continue to be hampered by the slow sampling speed of their iterative sampling processes. To address the challenge, consistency models have been proposed to facilitate fast inference, albeit at the cost of sample quality. In this work, we aim to break the quality bottleneck of a video consistency model (VCM) to achieve both fast and high-quality video generation. We introduce T2V-Turbo, which integrates feedback from a mixture of differentiable reward models into the consistency distillation (CD) process of a pre-trained T2V model. Notably, we directly optimize rewards associated with single-step generations that arise naturally from computing the CD loss, effectively bypassing the memory constraints imposed by backpropagating gradients through an iterative sampling process. Remarkably, the 4-step generations from our T2V-Turbo achieve the highest total score on VBench [Huang et al., 2024], even surpassing Gen-2 [Esser et al., 2023] and

Recent advancements in generative AI suggest the potential for large-scale interaction between autonomous agents and humans across platforms such as the internet. While such interactions could foster productive cooperation, the ability of AI agents to circumvent security oversight raises critical multi-agent security problems, particularly in the form of unintended information sharing or undesirable coordination. In our work, we establish the subfield of secret collusion, a form of multi-agent deception, in which two or more agents employ steganographic methods to conceal the true nature of their interactions, be it communicative or otherwise, from oversight. We propose a formal threat model for AI agents communicating steganographically and derive rigorous theoretical insights about the capacity and incentives of large language models (LLMs) to perform secret collusion, in addition to the limitations of threat mitigation measures. We complement our findings with empirical evaluations demonstrating rising steganographic capabilities in frontier single and multi-agent LLM setups and examining potential scenarios where collusion may emerge, revealing limitations in countermeasures such as monitoring, paraphrasing, and parameter optimization. Our work is the first to formalize and investigate secret collusion among frontier foundation models, identifying it as a critical area in AI Safety and outlining a comprehensive research agenda to mitigate future risks of collusion between generative AI systems.

Fine-tuning Diffusion Models remains an underexplored frontier in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), especially when compared with the remarkable progress made in fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs). While cutting-edge diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion (SD) and SDXL rely on supervised fine-tuning, their performance inevitably plateaus after seeing a certain volume of data. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been employed to fine-tune diffusion models with human preference data, but it requires at least two images ("winner" and "loser" images) for each text prompt. In this paper, we introduce an innovative technique called self-play fine-tuning for diffusion models (SPIN-Diffusion), where the diffusion model engages in competition with its earlier versions, facilitating an iterative self-improvement process. Our approach offers an alternative to conventional supervised fine-tuning and RL strategies, significantly improving both model performance and alignment. Our experiments on the Picka-Pic dataset reveal that SPIN-Diffusion outperforms the existing supervised finetuning method in aspects of human preference alignment and visual appeal right from its first iteration. By the second iteration, it exceeds the performance of RLHF-based methods across all metrics, achieving these results with less data.

OpenAI is a strange company for strange times. Valued at 300 billion--roughly the same as seven Fords or one and a half PepsiCos--the AI start-up has an era-defining product in ChatGPT and is racing to be the first to build superintelligent machines. The company is also, to the apparent frustration of its CEO Sam Altman, beholden to its nonprofit status. When OpenAI was founded in 2015, it was meant to be a research lab that would work toward the goal of AI that is "safe" and "benefits all of humanity." There wasn't supposed to be any pressure--or desire, really--to make money.

The AI revolution is well and truly upon us. As we grapple with the ramifications of generative AI in our professional and personal worlds, it's worth remembering that its impact will be felt in even the most intimate corners of our lives -- including our private browsers. Whether you're aware of it or not, AI is coming for the porn industry. Already, there are a number of new genres emerging which make use of generative AI, such as hyper porn, a genre of erotic imagery which stretches the limits of sexuality and human anatomy to hyperbolic new heights (think: a Barbie-esque woman with three giant breasts, instead of two). There are also various iterations of'gone wild' porn, a subdivision of porn which sees users attempt to'trick' safe-for-work image generation models like Dall-E into depicting erotic scenes -- and enjoying the work-arounds and euphemisms which these tools may use to avoid depicting explicit sex.

AI agents are being rapidly deployed within organizations even as they sow security fears, according to a new report from data governance firm SailPoint. Based on a global survey of more than 350 IT professionals, the report found that the widespread embrace of agents -- AI systems capable of formulating plans and taking action without human oversight -- is taking place within a security vacuum. Of IT pros who responded, 84% said their organizations already use agents internally, but just over half that number (44%) currently have policies in place to control the agents' behavior. Even more strikingly, 96% of respondents said they view agents as a security risk, yet 98% also said their employers plan to expand their use of agents in the coming year. Agents are the latest wave in a flood of innovation surrounding generative AI, which began in earnest following OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in late 2022.

DALL E) can produce high-quality images based on input language descriptions. These models incorporate a black-box safety filter to prevent the generation of unsafe or unethical content, such as violent, criminal, or hateful imagery. Recent jailbreaking methods generate adversarial prompts capable of bypassing safety filters and producing unsafe content, exposing vulnerabilities in influential commercial models. However, once these adversarial prompts are identified, the safety filter can be updated to prevent the generation of unsafe images. In this work, we propose an effective, simple, and difficult-to-detect jailbreaking solution: generating safe content initially with normal text prompts and then editing the generations to embed unsafe content.

Structure-based drug design (SBDD) aims to discover drug candidates by finding molecules (ligands) that bind tightly to a disease-related protein (targets), which is the primary approach to computer-aided drug discovery. Recently, applying deep generative models for three-dimensional (3D) molecular design conditioned on protein pockets to solve SBDD has attracted much attention, but their formulation as probabilistic modeling often leads to unsatisfactory optimization performance. On the other hand, traditional combinatorial optimization methods such as genetic algorithms (GA) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in various molecular optimization tasks. However, they do not utilize protein target structure to inform design steps but rely on a random-walk-like exploration, which leads to unstable performance and no knowledge transfer between different tasks despite the similar binding physics. To achieve a more stable and efficient SBDD, we propose Reinforced Genetic Algorithm (RGA) that uses neural models to prioritize the profitable design steps and suppress random-walk behavior. The neural models take the 3D structure of the targets and ligands as inputs and are pre-trained using native complex structures to utilize the knowledge of the shared binding physics from different targets and then fine-tuned during optimization. We conduct thorough empirical studies on optimizing binding affinity to various disease targets and show that RGA outperforms the baselines in terms of docking scores and is more robust to random initializations. The ablation study also indicates that the training on different targets helps improve the performance by leveraging the shared underlying physics of the binding processes.

Image generation has shown remarkable results in generating high-fidelity realistic images, in particular with the advancement of diffusion-based models. However, the prevalence of AI-generated images may have side effects for the machine learning community that are not clearly identified. Meanwhile, the success of deep learning in computer vision is driven by the massive dataset collected on the Internet. The extensive quantity of synthetic data being added to the Internet would become an obstacle for future researchers to collect "clean" datasets without AI-generated content. Prior research has shown that using datasets contaminated by synthetic images may result in performance degradation when used for training. In this paper, we investigate the potential impact of contaminated datasets on Online Continual Learning (CL) research. We experimentally show that contaminated datasets might hinder the training of existing online CL methods. Also, we propose Entropy Selection with Real-synthetic similarity Maximization (ESRM), a method to alleviate the performance deterioration caused by synthetic images when training online CL models. Experiments show that our method can significantly alleviate performance deterioration, especially when the contamination is severe.