Generative AI
Musk sues Apple and OpenAI, saying they hurt AI competition
Elon Musk has accused Apple and OpenAI in a lawsuit of unfairly favoring the artificial intelligence company across iPhones and thwarting competition for other chatbot makers. Musk's X and xAI seek billions of dollars in damages in the suit filed Monday in U.S. federal court in Fort Worth, Texas, arguing that Apple's decision to integrate OpenAI into the iPhone's operating system inhibits rivalry and innovation within the AI industry and harms consumers by depriving them of choice. The billionaire founder of xAI, which now houses the Grok AI team and X social network, said Apple makes it impossible for anyone other than OpenAI's ChatGPT to reach the top of the App Store charts, a sought-after global spotlight for app developers.
Are LLMs reliable? An exploration of the reliability of large language models in clinical note generation
Carandang, Kristine Ann M., Araรฑa, Jasper Meynard P., Casin, Ethan Robert A., Monterola, Christopher P., Tan, Daniel Stanley Y., Valenzuela, Jesus Felix B., Alis, Christian M.
Due to the legal and ethical responsibilities of healthcare providers (HCPs) for accurate documentation and protection of patient data privacy, the natural variability in the responses of large language models (LLMs) presents challenges for incorporating clinical note generation (CNG) systems, driven by LLMs, into real-world clinical processes. The complexity is further amplified by the detailed nature of texts in CNG. To enhance the confidence of HCPs in tools powered by LLMs, this study evaluates the reliability of 12 open-weight and proprietary LLMs from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and OpenAI in CNG in terms of their ability to generate notes that are string equivalent (consistency rate), have the same meaning (semantic consistency) and are correct (semantic similarity), across several iterations using the same prompt. The results show that (1) LLMs from all model families are stable, such that their responses are semantically consistent despite being written in various ways, and (2) most of the LLMs generated notes close to the corresponding notes made by experts. Overall, Meta's Llama 70B was the most reliable, followed by Mistral's Small model. With these findings, we recommend the local deployment of these relatively smaller open-weight models for CNG to ensure compliance with data privacy regulations, as well as to improve the efficiency of HCPs in clinical documentation.
Where's the liability in the Generative Era? Recovery-based Black-Box Detection of AI-Generated Content
Bai, Haoyue, Sun, Yiyou, Cheng, Wei, Chen, Haifeng
The recent proliferation of photorealistic images created by generative models has sparked both excitement and concern, as these images are increasingly indistinguishable from real ones to the human eye. While offering new creative and commercial possibilities, the potential for misuse, such as in misinformation and fraud, highlights the need for effective detection methods. Current detection approaches often rely on access to model weights or require extensive collections of real image datasets, limiting their scalability and practical application in real-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce a novel black-box detection framework that requires only API access, sidestepping the need for model weights or large auxiliary datasets. Our approach leverages a corrupt-and-recover strategy: by masking part of an image and assessing the model's ability to reconstruct it, we measure the likelihood that the image was generated by the model itself. F or black-box models that do not support masked-image inputs, we incorporate a cost-efficient surrogate model trained to align with the target model's distribution, enhancing detection capability. Our framework demonstrates strong performance, outperforming baseline methods by 4.31% in mean average precision across eight diffusion model variant datasets. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/
Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation Strategies for Large Language Models in Travel Mode Choice Prediction
Accurately predicting travel mode choice is essential for effective transportation planning, yet traditional statistical and machine learning models are constrained by rigid assumptions, limited contextual reasoning, and reduced generalizability. This study explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) as a more flexible and context-aware approach to travel mode choice prediction, enhanced by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to ground predictions in empirical data. We develop a modular framework for integrating RAG into LLM-based travel mode choice prediction and evaluate four retrieval strategies: basic RAG, RAG with balanced retrieval, RAG with a cross-encoder for re-ranking, and RAG with balanced retrieval and cross-encoder for re-ranking. These strategies are tested across three LLM architectures (OpenAI GPT-4o, o4-mini, and o3) to examine the interaction between model reasoning capabilities and retrieval methods. Using the 2023 Puget Sound Regional Household Travel Survey data, we conduct a series of experiments to evaluate model performance. The results demonstrate that RAG substantially enhances predictive accuracy across a range of models. Notably, the GPT-4o model combined with balanced retrieval and cross-encoder re-ranking achieves the highest accuracy of 80.8%, exceeding that of conventional statistical and machine learning baselines. Furthermore, LLM-based models exhibit superior generalization abilities relative to these baselines. Findings highlight the critical interplay between LLM reasoning capabilities and retrieval strategies, demonstrating the importance of aligning retrieval strategies with model capabilities to maximize the potential of LLM-based travel behavior modeling.
Decoding Alignment: A Critical Survey of LLM Development Initiatives through Value-setting and Data-centric Lens
AI Alignment, primarily in the form of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), has been a cornerstone of the post-training phase in developing Large Language Models (LLMs). It has also been a popular research topic across various disciplines beyond Computer Science, including Philosophy and Law, among others, highlighting the socio-technical challenges involved. Nonetheless, except for the computational techniques related to alignment, there has been limited focus on the broader picture: the scope of these processes, which primarily rely on the selected objectives (values), and the data collected and used to imprint such objectives into the models. This work aims to reveal how alignment is understood and applied in practice from a value-setting and data-centric perspective. For this purpose, we investigate and survey (`audit') publicly available documentation released by 6 LLM development initiatives by 5 leading organizations shaping this technology, focusing on proprietary (OpenAI's GPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini) and open-weight (Meta's Llama, Google's Gemma, and Alibaba's Qwen) initiatives, all published in the last 3 years. The findings are documented in detail per initiative, while there is also an overall summary concerning different aspects, mainly from a value-setting and data-centric perspective. On the basis of our findings, we discuss a series of broader related concerns.
Exploring the Impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Software Development in the IT Sector: Preliminary Findings on Productivity, Efficiency and Job Security
Bonin, Anton Ludwig, Smolinski, Pawel Robert, Winiarski, Jacek
This study investigates the impact of Generative AI on software development within the IT sector through a mixed-method approach, utilizing a survey developed based on expert interviews. The preliminary results of an ongoing survey offer early insights into how Generative AI reshapes personal productivity, organizational efficiency, adoption, business strategy and job insecurity. The findings reveal that 97% of IT workers use Generative AI tools, mainly ChatGPT. Participants report significant personal productivity gain and perceive organizational efficiency improvements that correlate positively with Generative AI adoption by their organizations (r = .470, p < .05). However, increased organizational adoption of AI strongly correlates with heightened employee job security concerns (r = .549, p < .001). Key adoption challenges include inaccurate outputs (64.2%), regulatory compliance issues (58.2%) and ethical concerns (52.2%). This research offers early empirical insights into Generative AI's economic and organizational implications.
DecoMind: A Generative AI System for Personalized Interior Design Layouts
Alshehri, Reema, Alotaibi, Rawan, Almasri, Leen, Altaweel, Rawan
--This paper introduces a system for generating interior design layouts based on user inputs, such as room type, style, and furniture preferences. CLIP extracts relevant furniture from a dataset, and a layout that contains furniture and a prompt are fed to the Stable Diffusion with ControlNet to generate a design that incorporates the selected furniture. The design is then evaluated by classifiers to ensure alignment with the user's inputs, offering an automated solution for realistic interior design. I. Introduction Interior design has become increasingly popular as people seek more comfort and personalization in their living spaces. While hiring professional designers is common for full-home projects, redesigning a single room--such as a bedroom--may not justify the cost or effort involved in hiring such services.Additionally, many individuals who prefer to furnish their rooms using items from specific stores like IKEA often feel uncertain about whether suggested furniture--based on their selected categories (e.g., sofa, table)--will suit the room's size, layout, and style.
From Classical Probabilistic Latent Variable Models to Modern Generative AI: A Unified Perspective
From large language models to multi-modal agents, Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) now underpins state-of-the-art systems. Despite their varied architectures, many share a common foundation in probabilistic latent variable models (PLVMs), where hidden variables explain observed data for density estimation, latent reasoning, and structured inference. This paper presents a unified perspective by framing both classical and modern generative methods within the PLVM paradigm. We trace the progression from classical flat models such as probabilistic PCA, Gaussian mixture models, latent class analysis, item response theory, and latent Dirichlet allocation, through their sequential extensions including Hidden Markov Models, Gaussian HMMs, and Linear Dynamical Systems, to contemporary deep architectures: Variational Autoencoders as Deep PLVMs, Normalizing Flows as Tractable PLVMs, Diffusion Models as Sequential PLVMs, Autoregressive Models as Explicit Generative Models, and Generative Adversarial Networks as Implicit PLVMs. Viewing these architectures under a common probabilistic taxonomy reveals shared principles, distinct inference strategies, and the representational trade-offs that shape their strengths. We offer a conceptual roadmap that consolidates generative AI's theoretical foundations, clarifies methodological lineages, and guides future innovation by grounding emerging architectures in their probabilistic heritage.
Continual Learning for Generative AI: From LLMs to MLLMs and Beyond
Guo, Haiyang, Zeng, Fanhu, Zhu, Fei, Wang, Jiayi, Wang, Xukai, Zhou, Jingang, Zhao, Hongbo, Liu, Wenzhuo, Ma, Shijie, Wang, Da-Han, Zhang, Xu-Yao, Liu, Cheng-Lin
The rapid advancement of generative models has empowered modern AI systems to comprehend and produce highly sophisticated content, even achieving human-level performance in specific domains. However, these models are fundamentally constrained by \emph{catastrophic forgetting}, \ie~a persistent challenge where models experience performance degradation on previously learned tasks when adapting to new tasks. To address this practical limitation, numerous approaches have been proposed to enhance the adaptability and scalability of generative AI in real-world applications. In this work, we present a comprehensive survey of continual learning methods for mainstream generative AI models, encompassing large language models, multimodal large language models, vision-language-action models, and diffusion models. Drawing inspiration from the memory mechanisms of the human brain, we systematically categorize these approaches into three paradigms: architecture-based, regularization-based, and replay-based methods, while elucidating their underlying methodologies and motivations. We further analyze continual learning setups for different generative models, including training objectives, benchmarks, and core backbones, thereby providing deeper insights into the field. The project page of this paper is available at https://github.com/Ghy0501/Awesome-Continual-Learning-in-Generative-Models.
Musk sues Apple, OpenAI over alleged AI competition suppression
Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI has sued Apple and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, accusing them of illegally conspiring to thwart competition for artificial intelligence (AI). The lawsuit filed in a United States federal court in Texas on Monday says that Apple and OpenAI have "locked up markets to maintain their monopolies and prevent innovators like X and xAI from competing". The complaint filed by the billionaire said Apple and OpenAI conspired to suppress xAI's products, including on the Apple App Store. "If not for its exclusive deal with OpenAI, Apple would have no reason to refrain from more prominently featuring the X app and the Grok app in its App Store," xAI said. The lawsuit pointed out that in June 2024, Apple and OpenAI announced they would integrate ChatGPT into Apple's operating system under an exclusive arrangement.