Generative AI
The AI Summit Where Everyone Agreed on Bad News
Top AI CEOs like DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and OpenAI's Sam Altman have recently been urging academics and governments to grapple with this issue more deeply, to better prepare the world for what they expect will be a highly disruptive economic shock. So, every day for a week--in breakout rooms and in a nightly communal sauna--these 18 experts hashed out a picture of what economic shocks might be coming down the trackโฆ and what to do about them. Bad news -- One outcome of the so-called "AGI social contract summit" was a list of four consensus statements, according to the summit's organizers. These statements have not previously been reported. They paint a grim picture of where the world could be headed, absent significant interventions by governments and societies.
A Systematic Review on the Generative AI Applications in Human Medical Genomics
Changalidis, Anton, Barbitoff, Yury, Nasykhova, Yulia, Glotov, Andrey
Although traditional statistical techniques and machine learning methods have contributed significantly to genetics and, in particular, inherited disease diagnosis, they often struggle with complex, high-dimensional data, a challenge now addressed by state-of-the-art deep learning models. Large language models (LLMs), based on transformer architectures, have excelled in tasks requiring contextual comprehension of unstructured medical data. This systematic review examines the role of LLMs in the genetic research and diagnostics of both rare and common diseases. Automated keyword-based search in PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and arXiv was conducted, targeting studies on LLM applications in diagnostics and education within genetics and removing irrelevant or outdated models. A total of 172 studies were analyzed, highlighting applications in genomic variant identification, annotation, and interpretation, as well as medical imaging advancements through vision transformers. Key findings indicate that while transformer-based models significantly advance disease and risk stratification, variant interpretation, medical imaging analysis, and report generation, major challenges persist in integrating multimodal data (genomic sequences, imaging, and clinical records) into unified and clinically robust pipelines, facing limitations in generalizability and practical implementation in clinical settings. This review provides a comprehensive classification and assessment of the current capabilities and limitations of LLMs in transforming hereditary disease diagnostics and supporting genetic education, serving as a guide to navigate this rapidly evolving field.
Generative AI Against Poaching: Latent Composite Flow Matching for Wildlife Conservation
Kong, Lingkai, Wang, Haichuan, Emogor, Charles A., Bรถrsch-Supan, Vincent, Xu, Lily, Tambe, Milind
Poaching poses significant threats to wildlife and biodiversity. A valuable step in reducing poaching is to forecast poacher behavior, which can inform patrol planning and other conservation interventions. Existing poaching prediction methods based on linear models or decision trees lack the expressivity to capture complex, nonlinear spatiotemporal patterns. Recent advances in generative modeling, particularly flow matching, offer a more flexible alternative. However, training such models on real-world poaching data faces two central obstacles: imperfect detection of poaching events and limited data. To address imperfect detection, we integrate flow matching with an occupancy-based detection model and train the flow in latent space to infer the underlying occupancy state. To mitigate data scarcity, we adopt a composite flow initialized from a linear-model prediction rather than random noise which is the standard in diffusion models, injecting prior knowledge and improving generalization. Evaluations on datasets from two national parks in Uganda show consistent gains in predictive accuracy.
Prompt Engineering and the Effectiveness of Large Language Models in Enhancing Human Productivity
The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek has significantly changed how people approach tasks in education, professional work, and creative domains. This paper investigates how the structure and clarity of user prompts impact the effectiveness and productivity of LLM outputs. Using data from 243 survey respondents across various academic and occupational backgrounds, we analyze AI usage habits, prompting strategies, and user satisfaction. The results show that users who employ clear, structured, and context-aware prompts report higher task efficiency and better outcomes. These findings emphasize the essential role of prompt engineering in maximizing the value of generative AI and provide practical implications for its everyday use.
Veritas: Generalizable Deepfake Detection via Pattern-Aware Reasoning
Tan, Hao, Lan, Jun, Tan, Zichang, Liu, Ajian, Song, Chuanbiao, Shi, Senyuan, Zhu, Huijia, Wang, Weiqiang, Wan, Jun, Lei, Zhen
Deepfake detection remains a formidable challenge due to the complex and evolving nature of fake content in real-world scenarios. However, existing academic benchmarks suffer from severe discrepancies from industrial practice, typically featuring homogeneous training sources and low-quality testing images, which hinder the practical deployments of current detectors. To mitigate this gap, we introduce HydraFake, a dataset that simulates real-world challenges with hierarchical generalization testing. Specifically, HydraFake involves diversified deepfake techniques and in-the-wild forgeries, along with rigorous training and evaluation protocol, covering unseen model architectures, emerging forgery techniques and novel data domains. Building on this resource, we propose Veritas, a multi-modal large language model (MLLM) based deepfake detector. Different from vanilla chain-of-thought (CoT), we introduce pattern-aware reasoning that involves critical reasoning patterns such as "planning" and "self-reflection" to emulate human forensic process. We further propose a two-stage training pipeline to seamlessly internalize such deepfake reasoning capacities into current MLLMs. Experiments on HydraFake dataset reveal that although previous detectors show great generalization on cross-model scenarios, they fall short on unseen forgeries and data domains. Our Veritas achieves significant gains across different OOD scenarios, and is capable of delivering transparent and faithful detection outputs.
Understanding, Protecting, and Augmenting Human Cognition with Generative AI: A Synthesis of the CHI 2025 Tools for Thought Workshop
Tankelevitch, Lev, Glassman, Elena L., He, Jessica, Kittur, Aniket, Lee, Mina, Palani, Srishti, Sarkar, Advait, Ramos, Gonzalo, Rogers, Yvonne, Subramonyam, Hari
Generative AI (GenAI) radically expands the scope and capability of automation for work, education, and everyday tasks, a transformation posing both risks and opportunities for human cognition. How will human cognition change, and what opportunities are there for GenAI to augment it? Which theories, metrics, and other tools are needed to address these questions? The CHI 2025 workshop on Tools for Thought aimed to bridge an emerging science of how the use of GenAI affects human thought, from metacognition to critical thinking, memory, and creativity, with an emerging design practice for building GenAI tools that both protect and augment human thought. Fifty-six researchers, designers, and thinkers from across disciplines as well as industry and academia, along with 34 papers and portfolios, seeded a day of discussion, ideation, and community-building. We synthesize this material here to begin mapping the space of research and design opportunities and to catalyze a multidisciplinary community around this pressing area of research.
Unleashing Uncertainty: Efficient Machine Unlearning for Generative AI
Spartalis, Christoforos N., Semertzidis, Theodoros, Daras, Petros, Gavves, Efstratios
We introduce SAFEMax, a novel method for Machine Unlearning in diffusion models. Grounded in information-theoretic principles, SAFEMax maximizes the entropy in generated images, causing the model to generate Gaussian noise when conditioned on impermissible classes by ultimately halting its denoising process. Also, our method controls the balance between forgetting and retention by selectively focusing on the early diffusion steps, where class-specific information is prominent. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of SAFEMax and highlight its substantial efficiency gains over state-of-the-art methods.
Studying Effective String Theory using deep generative models
Caselle, Michele, Cellini, Elia, Nada, Alessandro
Effective String Theory (EST) offers a robust non-perturbative framework for describing confinement in Yang-Mills theory by treating the confining flux tube between a static quark-antiquark pair as a thin, vibrating string. While EST calculations are typically carried out using zeta-function regularization, certain problems-such as determining the flux tube width-are too complex to solve analytically. However, recent studies have demonstrated that EST can be explored numerically by employing deep learning techniques based on generative algorithms. In this work, we provide a brief introduction to EST and this novel numerical approach. Finally, we present results for the width of the Nambu-Gotรถ EST.
AI and Agile Software Development: A Research Roadmap from the XP2025 Workshop
Zhang, Zheying, Herda, Tomas, Pichler, Victoria, Abrahamsson, Pekka, Hanssen, Geir K., Kerievsky, Joshua, Polyakov, Alex, Chandna, Mohit, Irgens, Marius, Kemell, Kai-Kristian, Khan, Ayman Asad, Kwok, Crystal, Leybourn, Evan, Malik, Munish, Mleczko, Dorota, Moalagh, Morteza, Morales, Christopher, Pieskova, Yuliia, Planรถtscher, Daniel, Saari, Mika, Tkalich, Anastasiia, Gstettner, Karl Josef, Wang, Xiaofeng
This paper synthesizes the key findings from a full-day XP2025 workshop on "AI and Agile: From Frustration to Success", held in Brugg-Windisch, Switzerland. The workshop brought together over 30 interdisciplinary academic researchers and industry practitioners to tackle the concrete challenges and emerging opportunities at the intersection of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and agile software development. Through structured, interactive breakout sessions, participants identified shared pain points like tool fragmentation, governance, data quality, and critical skills gaps in AI literacy and prompt engineering. These issues were further analyzed, revealing underlying causes and cross-cutting concerns. The workshop concluded by collaboratively co-creating a multi-thematic research roadmap, articulating both short-term, implementable actions and visionary, long-term research directions. This cohesive agenda aims to guide future investigation and drive the responsible, human-centered integration of GenAI into agile practices.
Do Students Rely on AI? Analysis of Student-ChatGPT Conversations from a Field Study
Zheng, Jiayu, Hao, Lingxin, Lu, Kelun, Garg, Ashi, Reese, Mike, Yap, Melo-Jean, Wang, I-Jeng, Wu, Xingyun, Huang, Wenrui, Hoffman, Jenna, Kelly, Ariane, Le, My, Zhang, Ryan, Lin, Yanyu, Faayez, Muhammad, Liu, Anqi
This study explores how college students interact with generative AI (ChatGPT-4) during educational quizzes, focusing on reliance and predictors of AI adoption. Conducted at the early stages of ChatGPT implementation, when students had limited familiarity with the tool, this field study analyzed 315 student-AI conversations during a brief, quiz-based scenario across various STEM courses. A novel four-stage reliance taxonomy was introduced to capture students' reliance patterns, distinguishing AI competence, relevance, adoption, and students' final answer correctness. Three findings emerged. First, students exhibited overall low reliance on AI and many of them could not effectively use AI for learning. Second, negative reliance patterns often persisted across interactions, highlighting students' difficulty in effectively shifting strategies after unsuccessful initial experiences. Third, certain behavioral metrics strongly predicted AI reliance, highlighting potential behavioral mechanisms to explain AI adoption. The study's findings underline critical implications for ethical AI integration in education and the broader field. It emphasizes the need for enhanced onboarding processes to improve student's familiarity and effective use of AI tools. Furthermore, AI interfaces should be designed with reliance-calibration mechanisms to enhance appropriate reliance. Ultimately, this research advances understanding of AI reliance dynamics, providing foundational insights for ethically sound and cognitively enriching AI practices.