Generative AI
Galaxy image simplification using Generative AI
Erukude, Sai Teja, Shamir, Lior
Modern digital sky surveys have been acquiring images of billions of galaxies. While these images often provide sufficient details to analyze the shape of the galaxies, accurate analysis of such high volumes of images requires effective automation. Current solutions often rely on machine learning annotation of the galaxy images based on a set of pre-defined classes. Here we introduce a new approach to galaxy image analysis that is based on generative AI. The method simplifies the galaxy images and automatically converts them into a ``skeletonized" form. The simplified images allow accurate measurements of the galaxy shapes and analysis that is not limited to a certain pre-defined set of classes. We demonstrate the method by applying it to galaxy images acquired by the DESI Legacy Survey. The code and data are publicly available. The method was applied to 125,000 DESI Legacy Survey images, and the catalog of the simplified images is publicly available.
What's Pulling the Strings? Evaluating Integrity and Attribution in AI Training and Inference through Concept Shift
Chang, Jiamin, Li, Haoyang, Pearce, Hammond, Sun, Ruoxi, Li, Bo, Xue, Minhui
The growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has amplified concerns about trustworthiness, including integrity, privacy, robustness, and bias. To assess and attribute these threats, we propose ConceptLens, a generic framework that leverages pre-trained multimodal models to identify the root causes of integrity threats by analyzing Concept Shift in probing samples. ConceptLens demonstrates strong detection performance for vanilla data poisoning attacks and uncovers vulnerabilities to bias injection, such as the generation of covert advertisements through malicious concept shifts. It identifies privacy risks in unaltered but high-risk samples, filters them before training, and provides insights into model weaknesses arising from incomplete or imbalanced training data. Additionally, at the model level, it attributes concepts that the target model is overly dependent on, identifies misleading concepts, and explains how disrupting key concepts negatively impacts the model. Furthermore, it uncovers sociological biases in generative content, revealing disparities across sociological contexts. Strikingly, ConceptLens reveals how safe training and inference data can be unintentionally and easily exploited, potentially undermining safety alignment. Our study informs actionable insights to breed trust in AI systems, thereby speeding adoption and driving greater innovation.
Draw an Ugly Person An Exploration of Generative AIs Perceptions of Ugliness
Kim, Garyoung, Kwon, Huisung, Yun, Seoju, Youn, Yu-Won
Generative AI does not only replicate human creativity but also reproduces deep-seated cultural biases, making it crucial to critically examine how concepts like ugliness are understood and expressed by these tools. This study investigates how four different generative AI models understand and express ugliness through text and image and explores the biases embedded within these representations. We extracted 13 adjectives associated with ugliness through iterative prompting of a large language model and generated 624 images across four AI models and three prompts. Demographic and socioeconomic attributes within the images were independently coded and thematically analyzed. Our findings show that AI models disproportionately associate ugliness with old white male figures, reflecting entrenched social biases as well as paradoxical biases, where efforts to avoid stereotypical depictions of marginalized groups inadvertently result in the disproportionate projection of negative attributes onto majority groups. Qualitative analysis further reveals that, despite supposed attempts to frame ugliness within social contexts, conventional physical markers such as asymmetry and aging persist as central visual motifs. These findings demonstrate that despite attempts to create more equal representations, generative AI continues to perpetuate inherited and paradoxical biases, underscoring the critical work being done to create ethical AI training paradigms and advance methodologies for more inclusive AI development.
A Review of Generative AI in Aquaculture: Foundations, Applications, and Future Directions for Smart and Sustainable Farming
Akram, Waseem, Din, Muhayy Ud, Soud, Lyes Saad, Hussain, Irfan
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has rapidly emerged as a transformative force in aquaculture, enabling intelligent synthesis of multimodal data, including text, images, audio, and simulation outputs for smarter, more adaptive decision-making. As the aquaculture industry shifts toward data-driven, automation and digital integration operations under the Aquaculture 4.0 paradigm, GAI models offer novel opportunities across environmental monitoring, robotics, disease diagnostics, infrastructure planning, reporting, and market analysis. This review presents the first comprehensive synthesis of GAI applications in aquaculture, encompassing foundational architectures (e.g., diffusion models, transformers, and retrieval augmented generation), experimental systems, pilot deployments, and real-world use cases. We highlight GAI's growing role in enabling underwater perception, digital twin modeling, and autonomous planning for remotely operated vehicle (ROV) missions. We also provide an updated application taxonomy that spans sensing, control, optimization, communication, and regulatory compliance. Beyond technical capabilities, we analyze key limitations, including limited data availability, real-time performance constraints, trust and explainability, environmental costs, and regulatory uncertainty. This review positions GAI not merely as a tool but as a critical enabler of smart, resilient, and environmentally aligned aquaculture systems.
Challenges in GenAI and Authentication: a scoping review
Bezerra, Wesley dos Reis, Bezerra, Lais Machado, Westphall, Carlos Becker
Authentication and authenticity have been a security challenge since the beginning of information sharing, especially in the context of digital information. With the advancement of generative artificial intelligence, these challenges have evolved, demanding a more up-to-date analysis of their impacts on society and system security. This work presents a scoping review that analyzed 88 documents from the IEEExplorer, Scopus, and ACM databases, promoting an analysis of the resulting portfolio through six guiding questions focusing on the most relevant work, challenges, attack surfaces, threats, proposed solutions, and gaps. Finally, the portfolio articles are analyzed through this guiding research lens and also receive individualized analysis. The results consistently outline the challenges, gaps, and threats related to images, text, audio, and video, thereby supporting new research in the areas of authentication and generative artificial intelligence.
A Review of Generative AI in Computer Science Education: Challenges and Opportunities in Accuracy, Authenticity, and Assessment
Reihanian, Iman, Hou, Yunfei, Chen, Yu, Zheng, Yifei
This paper surveys the use of Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Claude, in computer science education, focusing on key aspects of accuracy, authenticity, and assessment. Through a literature review, we highlight both the challenges and opportunities these AI tools present. While Generative AI improves efficiency and supports creative student work, it raises concerns such as AI hallucinations, error propagation, bias, and blurred lines between AI-assisted and student-authored content. Human oversight is crucial for addressing these concerns. Existing literature recommends adopting hybrid assessment models that combine AI with human evaluation, developing bias detection frameworks, and promoting AI literacy for both students and educators. Our findings suggest that the successful integration of AI requires a balanced approach, considering ethical, pedagogical, and technical factors. Future research may explore enhancing AI accuracy, preserving academic integrity, and developing adaptive models that balance creativity with precision.
Masayoshi Son and Sam Altman see no end to AI demand and scaling
SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son and OpenAI chief Sam Altman see insatiable demand for artificial intelligence (AI) that makes it imperative to keep building ever more computing capacity. Speaking via teleconference at SoftBank World, the two business partners argued that advancing AI would lead to new jobs that are not yet imagined, and the advancement of robotics will help kickstart a "self-improvement" loop. "As we drive the cost of AI down, more people want to use it," Altman said in response to Son's question about diminishing returns from further expansion. "So if we make the cost of AI 10 times cheaper, people wanna use it 30 times as much or whatever. And the demand for intelligence in the world just seems to be huge."
Another High-Profile OpenAI Researcher Departs for Meta
OpenAI researcher Jason Wei is joining Meta's new superintelligence lab, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Wei worked on OpenAI's o3 and deep research models, according to his personal website. He joined OpenAI in 2023 after a stint at Google, where he worked on chain-of-thought research, which involves training an AI model to process complex queries step-by-step. At OpenAI, Wei became a self-described "diehard" for reinforcement learning, a method of training or refining an AI model with positive or negative feedback. It's become a promising area of AI research--one that several of the researchers Meta has hired for its superintelligence team specialize in.
Visually grounded emotion regulation via diffusion models and user-driven reappraisal
Pinzuti, Edoardo, Tรผscher, Oliver, Castro, Andrรฉ Ferreira
Cognitive reappraisal is a key strategy in emotion regulation, involving reinterpretation of emotionally charged stimuli to alter affective responses. Despite its central role in clinical and cognitive science, real-world reappraisal interventions remain cognitively demanding, abstract, and primarily verbal. This reliance on higher-order cognitive and linguistic processes is often impaired in individuals with trauma or depression, limiting the effectiveness of standard approaches. Here, we propose a novel, visually based augmentation of cognitive reappraisal by integrating large-scale text-to-image diffusion models into the emotional regulation process. Specifically, we introduce a system in which users reinterpret emotionally negative images via spoken reappraisals, which are transformed into supportive, emotionally congruent visualizations using stable diffusion models with a fine-tuned IP-adapter. This generative transformation visually instantiates users' reappraisals while maintaining structural similarity to the original stimuli, externalizing and reinforcing regulatory intent. To test this approach, we conducted a within-subject experiment (N = 20) using a modified cognitive emotion regulation (CER) task. Participants reappraised or described aversive images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), with or without AI-generated visual feedback. Results show that AI-assisted reappraisal significantly reduced negative affect compared to both non-AI and control conditions. Further analyses reveal that sentiment alignment between participant reappraisals and generated images correlates with affective relief, suggesting that multimodal coherence enhances regulatory efficacy. These findings demonstrate that generative visual input can support cogitive reappraisal and open new directions at the intersection of generative AI, affective computing, and therapeutic technology.
Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Educational Textbook Question Answering
Alawwad, Hessa A., Zafar, Anas, Alhothali, Areej, Naseem, Usman, Alkhathlan, Ali, Jamal, Amani
Faculty of Computing and Information Technology & Center of Research Excellence in AI and Data Science King Abdulaziz University Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Abstract --Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown success in vision-language tasks, but their ability to reason over complex educational materials remains largely untested. This work presents the first evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs, including LLaV A-1.5 and LLaMA 3.2-Vision, on the textbook question answering (TQA) task using the CK12-QA dataset. We introduce a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline to simulate real-world learning by providing relevant lesson paragraphs and diagrams as context. Our zero-shot experiments reveal a critical trade-off; while retrieved context improves LLaV A's performance on text-based questions, it significantly degrades the accuracy of the more powerful LLaMA 3.2-Vision on diagram-based tasks, dropping its validation accuracy from 74.07% to 25.93%. Furthermore, fine-tuning highlights architectural differences; LLaMA 3.2-Vision's performance substantially improves to 71.16% on the test set, demonstrating its capacity to learn multimodal integration, whereas LLaV A's performance declines, indicating challenges with generalization. Our results underscore the challenges MLLMs face in modality prioritization and context integration, providing a benchmark and pointing to key directions for developing more robust AI-driven educational tools. Personal use of this material is permitted. This work has been accepted to the 2nd International Generative AI and Computational Language Modelling Conference (GACLM 2025) for publication in the proceedings. Answering curriculum-related questions in multimodal educational materials is a central challenge in AI for education, requiring systems to reason across complex multimodal contexts such as lengthy lessons, diagrams, and videos.