Generative AI
Doctor Approved: Generating Medically Accurate Skin Disease Images through AI-Expert Feedback
Paucity of medical data severely limits the generalizability of diagnostic ML models, as the full spectrum of disease variability can not be represented by a small clinical dataset. To address this, diffusion models (DMs) have been considered as a promising avenue for synthetic image generation and augmentation. However, they frequently produce medically inaccurate images, deteriorating the model performance. Expert domain knowledge is critical for synthesizing images that correctly encode clinical information, especially when data is scarce and quality outweighs quantity. Existing approaches for incorporating human feedback, such as reinforcement learning (RL) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), rely on robust reward functions or demand labor-intensive expert evaluations. Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) reveals their strong visual reasoning capabilities, making them adept candidates as evaluators. In this work, we propose a novel framework, coined MAGIC (Medically Accurate Generation of Images through AI-Expert Collaboration), that synthesizes clinically accurate skin disease images for data augmentation.
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Protein design is a fundamental challenge in biotechnology, aiming to design novel sequences with specific functions within the vast space of possible proteins. Recent advances in deep generative models have enabled function-based protein design from textual descriptions, yet struggle with structural plausibility. Inspired by classical protein design methods that leverage natural protein structures, we explore whether incorporating fragments from natural proteins can enhance foldability in generative models. Our empirical results show that even random incorporation of fragments improves foldability. Building on this insight, we introduce PRODVA, a novel protein design approach that integrates a text encoder for functional descriptions, a protein language model for designing proteins, and a fragment encoder to dynamically retrieve protein fragments based on textual functional descriptions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively designs protein sequences that are both functionally aligned and structurally plausible. Compared to state-of-the-art models, PRODVA achieves comparable function alignment using less than 0.04% of the training data, while designing significantly more well-folded proteins, with the proportion of proteins having pLDDT above 70 increasing by 7.38% and those with PAE below 10 increasing by 9.62%. 1
On the Closed-Form of Flow Matching: Generalization Does Not Arise from Target Stochasticity
Modern deep generative models can now produce high-quality synthetic samples that are often indistinguishable from real training data. A growing body of research aims to understand why recent methods, such as diffusion and flow matching techniques, generalize so effectively. Among the proposed explanations are the inductive biases of deep learning architectures and the stochastic nature of the conditional flow matching loss. In this work, we rule out the noisy nature of the loss as a key factor driving generalization in flow matching. First, we empirically show that in high-dimensional settings, the stochastic and closed-form versions of the flow matching loss yield nearly equivalent losses. Then, using state-of-the-art flow matching models on standard image datasets, we demonstrate that both variants achieve comparable statistical performance, with the surprising observation that using the closed-form can even improve performance.
Failure Prediction at Runtime for Generative Robot Policies
Imitation learning (IL) with generative models, such as diffusion and flow matching, has enabled robots to perform complex, long-horizon tasks. However, distribution shifts from unseen environments or compounding action errors can still cause unpredictable and unsafe behavior, leading to task failure. Therefore, early failure prediction during runtime is essential for deploying robots in human-centered and safety-critical environments. We propose FIPER, a general framework for Failure Prediction at Runtime for generative IL policies that does not require failure data. FIPER identifies two key indicators of impending failure: (i) out-ofdistribution (OOD) observations detected via random network distillation in the policy's embedding space, and (ii) high uncertainty in generated actions measured by a novel action-chunk entropy score.
Efficient Utility-Preserving Machine Unlearning with Implicit Gradient Surgery
Machine unlearning (MU) aims to efficiently remove sensitive or harmful memory from a pre-trained model. The key challenge is to balance the potential tradeoff between unlearning efficacy and utility preservation, which involves forgetting undesirable information as defined while maintaining the model's original performance. One potential way to tackle this problem is to use multi-objective optimization to jointly optimize both the unlearning and utility preservation objectives. However, existing multi-objective methods only guarantee finding a Pareto-optimal solution without fine-grained control, which causes under-optimization of the unlearning objective. To this end, we first model MU as a constrained optimization problem, that is, optimizing the unlearning objective under the constraint of a bounded increase for utility loss.
BountyBench: Dollar Impact of AI Agent Attackers and Defenders on Real-World Cybersecurity Systems
AI agents have the potential to significantly alter the cybersecurity landscape. Here, we introduce the first framework to capture offensive and defensive cyber-capabilities in evolving real-world systems. Instantiating this framework with BountyBench, we set up 25 systems with complex, real-world codebases. To capture the vulnerability lifecycle, we define three task types: Detect (detecting a new vulnerability), Exploit (exploiting a given vulnerability), and Patch (patching a given vulnerability). For Detect, we construct a new success indicator, which is general across vulnerability types and provides localized evaluation. We manually set up the environment for each system, including installing packages, setting up server(s), and hydrating database(s). We add 40 bug bounties, which are vulnerabilities with monetary awards from \\$10 to \\$30,485, covering 9 of the OWASP Top 10 Risks. To modulate task difficulty, we devise a new strategy based on information to guide detection, interpolating from identifying a zero day to exploiting a given vulnerability. We evaluate 10 agents: Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI with o3-high and o4-mini, and custom agents with o3-high, GPT-4.1,
Prohibiting Generative AI in any Form of Weapon Control
This position paper argues that the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to control, direct, guide or govern any weapon, either in situ or remotely, should be prohibited by government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Such a moratorium should exist until hallucinations can be successfully modeled and predicted. Generative AI is inherently unreliable and not appropriate in environments that could result in the loss of life.
Benchmarking Large Language Models with Integer Sequence Generation Tasks
We present a novel benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in mathematical reasoning and algorithmic code synthesis tasks. The benchmark comprises integer sequence generation tasks sourced from the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), testing LLMs' abilities to accurately and efficiently generate Python code to compute these sequences without using lookup tables. Our comprehensive evaluation includes leading models from OpenAI (including the specialized reasoning-focused o-series), Anthropic, Meta, and Google across a carefully selected set of 1000 OEIS sequences categorized as hard.'' Half of these sequences are classical sequences from the early days of OEIS and half were recently added to avoid contamination with the models' training data. To prevent models from exploiting memorized sequence values, we introduce an automated cheating detection mechanism that flags usage of lookup tables, validated by comparison with human expert evaluations. Experimental results demonstrate that reasoning-specialized models (o3, o3-mini, o4-mini from OpenAI, and Gemini 2.5-pro from Google) achieve substantial improvements in accuracy over non-reasoning models, especially on more complex tasks. However, overall model performance on the hard sequences is poor, highlighting persistent challenges in algorithmic reasoning. Our benchmark provides important insights into the strengths and limitations of state-of-the-art LLMs, particularly emphasizing the necessity for further advancements to reliably solve complex mathematical reasoning tasks algorithmically.
Real-Time Hyper-Personalized Generative AI Should Be Regulated to Prevent the Rise of "Digital Heroin"
This position paper argues that real-time generative AI has the potential to become the next wave of addictive digital media, creating a new class of digital content akin to ``digital heroin'' with severe implications for mental health and youth development. By shortening the content-generation feedback loop to mere seconds, these advanced models will soon be able to hyper-personalize outputs on the fly. When paired with misaligned incentives (e.g., maximizing user engagement), this will fuel unprecedented compulsive consumption patterns with far-reaching consequences for mental health, cognitive development, and social stability. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, from clinical observations of social media addiction to neuroscientific studies of dopamine-driven feedback, we illustrate how real-time tailored content generation may erode user autonomy, foment emotional distress, and disproportionately endanger vulnerable groups, such as adolescents. Due to the rapid advancement of generative AI and its potential to induce severe addiction-like effects, we call for strong government oversight akin to existing controls on addictive substances, particularly for minors. We further urge the machine learning community to act proactively by establishing robust design guidelines, collaborating with public health experts, and supporting targeted policy measures to ensure responsible and ethical deployment, rather than paving the way for another wave of unregulated digital dependence.
The ML.ENERGY Benchmark: Toward Automated Inference Energy Measurement and Optimization
As the adoption of Generative AI in real-world services grow explosively, energy has emerged as a critical bottleneck resource. However, energy remains a metric that is often overlooked, under-explored, or poorly understood in the context of building ML systems. We present the ML.ENERGY Benchmark, a benchmark suite and tool for measuring inference energy consumption under realistic service environments, and the corresponding ML.ENERGY Leaderboard, which have served as a valuable resource for those hoping to understand and optimize the energy consumption of their generative AI services. In this paper, we explain four key design principles for benchmarking ML energy we have acquired over time, and then describe how they are implemented in the ML.ENERGY Benchmark. We then highlight results from the early 2025 iteration of the benchmark, including energy measurements of 40 widely used model architectures across 6 different tasks, case studies of how ML design choices impact energy consumption, and how automated optimization recommendations can lead to significant (sometimes more than 40%) energy savings without changing what is being computed by the model. The ML.ENERGY Benchmark is open-source and can be easily extended to various customized models and application scenarios.