Taiwanese China Studies (CS) has developed into a rich, interdisciplinary research field shaped by the unique geopolitical position and long standing academic engagement with Mainland China. This study responds to the growing need to systematically revisit and reorganize decades of Taiwan based CS scholarship by proposing an AI assisted approach that transforms unstructured academic texts into structured, interactive knowledge representations. We apply generative AI (GAI) techniques and large language models (LLMs) to extract and standardize entity relation triples from 1,367 peer reviewed CS articles published between 1996 and 2019. These triples are then visualized through a lightweight D3.js based system, forming the foundation of a domain specific knowledge graph and vector database for the field. This infrastructure allows users to explore conceptual nodes and semantic relationships across the corpus, revealing previously uncharted intellectual trajectories, thematic clusters, and research gaps. By decomposing textual content into graph structured knowledge units, our system enables a paradigm shift from linear text consumption to network based knowledge navigation. In doing so, it enhances scholarly access to CS literature while offering a scalable, data driven alternative to traditional ontology construction. This work not only demonstrates how generative AI can augment area studies and digital humanities but also highlights its potential to support a reimagined scholarly infrastructure for regional knowledge systems.

Recent advances in deep generative models demonstrate unprecedented zero-shot generalization capabilities, offering great potential for robot manipulation in unstructured environments. Given a partial observation of a scene, deep generative models could generate the unseen regions and therefore provide more context, which enhances the capability of robots to generalize across unseen environments. However, due to the visual artifacts in generated images and inefficient integration of multi-modal features in policy learning, this direction remains an open challenge. We introduce NVSPolicy, a generalizable language-conditioned policy learning method that couples an adaptive novel-view synthesis module with a hierarchical policy network. Given an input image, NVSPolicy dynamically selects an informative viewpoint and synthesizes an adaptive novel-view image to enrich the visual context. To mitigate the impact of the imperfect synthesized images, we adopt a cycle-consistent VAE mechanism that disentangles the visual features into the semantic feature and the remaining feature. The two features are then fed into the hierarchical policy network respectively: the semantic feature informs the high-level meta-skill selection, and the remaining feature guides low-level action estimation. Moreover, we propose several practical mechanisms to make the proposed method efficient. Extensive experiments on CALVIN demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Specifically, it achieves an average success rate of 90.4\% across all tasks, greatly outperforming the recent methods. Ablation studies confirm the significance of our adaptive novel-view synthesis paradigm. In addition, we evaluate NVSPolicy on a real-world robotic platform to demonstrate its practical applicability.

A recent area of increasing research is the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in penetration testing, which promises to reduce costs and thus allow for higher frequency. We conduct a review of related work, identifying best practices and common evaluation issues. We then present AutoPentest, an application for performing black-box penetration tests with a high degree of autonomy. AutoPentest is based on the LLM GPT-4o from OpenAI and the LLM agent framework LangChain. It can perform complex multi-step tasks, augmented by external tools and knowledge bases. We conduct a study on three capture-the-flag style Hack The Box (HTB) machines, comparing our implementation AutoPentest with the baseline approach of manually using the ChatGPT-4o user interface. Both approaches are able to complete 15-25 % of the subtasks on the HTB machines, with AutoPentest slightly outperforming ChatGPT. We measure a total cost of \$96.20 US when using AutoPentest across all experiments, while a one-month subscription to ChatGPT Plus costs \$20. The results show that further implementation efforts and the use of more powerful LLMs released in the future are likely to make this a viable part of vulnerability management.

The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) presents new opportunities to advance the cartographic process. Previous studies have either overlooked the artistic aspects of maps or faced challenges in creating both accurate and informative maps. In this study, we propose CartoAgent, a novel multi-agent cartographic framework powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs). This framework simulates three key stages in cartographic practice: preparation, map design, and evaluation. At each stage, different MLLMs act as agents with distinct roles to collaborate, discuss, and utilize tools for specific purposes. In particular, CartoAgent leverages MLLMs' visual aesthetic capability and world knowledge to generate maps that are both visually appealing and informative. By separating style from geographic data, it can focus on designing stylesheets without modifying the vector-based data, thereby ensuring geographic accuracy. We applied CartoAgent to a specific task centered on map restyling-namely, map style transfer and evaluation. The effectiveness of this framework was validated through extensive experiments and a human evaluation study. CartoAgent can be extended to support a variety of cartographic design decisions and inform future integrations of GenAI in cartography.

In the summer of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, was meeting with a group of new researchers at the company. By all traditional metrics, Sutskever should have felt invincible: He was the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT, then the fastest-growing app in history; his company's valuation had skyrocketed; and OpenAI was the unrivaled leader of the industry believed to power the future of Silicon Valley. But the chief scientist seemed to be at war with himself. Sutskever had long believed that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, was inevitable--now, as things accelerated in the generative-AI industry, he believed AGI's arrival was imminent, according to Geoff Hinton, an AI pioneer who was his Ph.D. adviser and mentor, and another person familiar with Sutskever's thinking. To people around him, Sutskever seemed consumed by thoughts of this impending civilizational transformation. What would the world look like when a supreme AGI emerged and surpassed humanity? And what responsibility did OpenAI have to ensure an end state of extraordinary prosperity, not extraordinary suffering?

Ever since ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, people have been using it to generate text, from emails to blog posts to bad poetry, much of which they post online. Since that release, the companies that build the large language models (LLMs) on which such chatbots are based--such as OpenAI's GPT 3.5, the technology underlying ChatGPT--have also continued to put out newer versions of their models, training them with new text data, some of which they scraped off the Web. That means, inevitably, that some of the training data used to create LLMs did not come from humans, but from the LLMs themselves. That has led computer scientists to worry about a phenomenon they call model collapse. Basically, model collapse happens when the training data no longer matches real-world data, leading the new LLM to produce gibberish, in a 21st-century version of the classic computer aphorism "garbage in, garbage out."

Generative AI offers new opportunities for automating urban planning by creating site-specific urban layouts and enabling flexible design exploration. However, existing approaches often struggle to produce realistic and practical designs at scale. Therefore, we adapt a state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion model, extended with ControlNet, to generate high-fidelity satellite imagery conditioned on land use descriptions, infrastructure, and natural environments. To overcome data availability limitations, we spatially link satellite imagery with structured land use and constraint information from OpenStreetMap. Using data from three major U.S. cities, we demonstrate that the proposed diffusion model generates realistic and diverse urban landscapes by varying land-use configurations, road networks, and water bodies, facilitating cross-city learning and design diversity. We also systematically evaluate the impacts of varying language prompts and control imagery on the quality of satellite imagery generation. Our model achieves high FID and KID scores and demonstrates robustness across diverse urban contexts. Qualitative assessments from urban planners and the general public show that generated images align closely with design descriptions and constraints, and are often preferred over real images. This work establishes a benchmark for controlled urban imagery generation and highlights the potential of generative AI as a tool for enhancing planning workflows and public engagement.

Recent advances in generative AI, such as ChatGPT, have transformed access to information in education, knowledge-seeking, and everyday decision-making. However, in many developing regions, access remains a challenge due to the persistent digital divide. To help bridge this gap, we developed WaLLM - a custom AI chatbot over WhatsApp, a widely used communication platform in developing regions. Beyond answering queries, WaLLM offers several features to enhance user engagement: a daily top question, suggested follow-up questions, trending and recent queries, and a leaderboard-based reward system. Our service has been operational for over 6 months, amassing over 14.7K queries from approximately 100 users. In this paper, we present WaLLM's design and a systematic analysis of logs to understand user interactions. Our results show that 55% of user queries seek factual information. "Health and well-being" was the most popular topic (28%), including queries about nutrition and disease, suggesting users view WaLLM as a reliable source. Two-thirds of users' activity occurred within 24 hours of the daily top question. Users who accessed the "Leaderboard" interacted with WaLLM 3x as those who did not. We conclude by discussing implications for culture-based customization, user interface design, and appropriate calibration of users' trust in AI systems for developing regions.

--T ext-to-image (T2I) models have significantly advanced in producing high-quality images. However, such models have the ability to generate images containing not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content, such as pornography, violence, political content, and discrimination. T o mitigate the risk of generating NSFW content, refusal mechanisms, i.e., safety checkers, have been developed to check potential NSFW content. Adversarial prompting techniques have been developed to evaluate the robustness of the refusal mechanisms. The key challenge remains to subtly modify the prompt in a way that preserves its sensitive nature while bypassing the refusal mechanisms. In this paper, we introduce T okenProber, a method designed for sensitivity-aware differential testing, aimed at evaluating the robustness of the refusal mechanisms in T2I models by generating adversarial prompts. Our approach is based on the key observation that adversarial prompts often succeed by exploiting discrepancies in how T2I models and safety checkers interpret sensitive content. Thus, we conduct a fine-grained analysis of the impact of specific words within prompts, distinguishing between dirty words that are essential for NSFW content generation and discrepant words that highlight the different sensitivity assessments between T2I models and safety checkers. Through the sensitivity-aware mutation, T okenProbergenerates adversarial prompts, striking a balance between maintaining NSFW content generation and evading detection. Our evaluation of T okenProberagainst 5 safety checkers on 3 popular T2I models, using 324 NSFW prompts, demonstrates its superior effectiveness in bypassing safety filters compared to existing methods ( e.g., 54%+ increase on average), highlighting T okenProber's ability to uncover robustness issues in the existing refusal mechanisms. The source code, datasets, and experimental results are available in [1]. Warning: This paper contains model outputs that are offensive in nature. The Text-to-Image (T2I) models have gained widespread attention due to their excellent capability in synthesizing high-quality images. T2I models, such as Stable Diffusion [2] and DALL E [3], process the textual descriptions provided by users, namely prompts, and output images that match the descriptions. Such models have been widely used to generate various types of images, for example, the Lexica [4] contains more than five million images generated by Stable Diffusion.

Recent research has highlighted the risk of generative model collapse, where performance progressively degrades when continually trained on self-generated data. However, existing exploration on model collapse is limited to single, unimodal models, limiting our understanding in more realistic scenarios, such as diverse multi-modal AI agents interacting autonomously through synthetic data and continually evolving. We expand the synthetic data training and model collapse study to multi-modal vision-language generative systems, such as vision-language models (VLMs) and text-to-image diffusion models, as well as recursive generate-train loops with multiple models. We find that model collapse, previously observed in single-modality generative models, exhibits distinct characteristics in the multi-modal context, such as improved vision-language alignment and increased variance in VLM image-captioning task. Additionally, we find that general approaches such as increased decoding budgets, greater model diversity, and relabeling with frozen models can effectively mitigate model collapse. Our findings provide initial insights and practical guidelines for reducing the risk of model collapse in self-improving multi-agent AI systems and curating robust multi-modal synthetic datasets.