Generative AI
Nvidia Bets Big on Synthetic Data
Nvidia has acquired synthetic data firm Gretel for nine figures, according to two people with direct knowledge of the deal. The acquisition price exceeds Gretel's most recent valuation of 320 million, the sources say, though the exact terms of the purchase remain unknown. Gretel and its team of approximately 80 employees will be folded into Nvidia, where its technology will be deployed as part of the chip giant's growing suite of cloud-based, generative AI services for developers. The acquisition comes as Nvidia has been rolling out synthetic data generation tools, so that developers can train their own AI models and fine-tune them for specific apps. In theory, synthetic data could create a near-infinite supply of AI training data and help solve the data scarcity problem that has been looming over the AI industry since ChatGPT went mainstream in 2022--although experts say using synthetic data in generative AI comes with its own risks.
Advancing Deep Learning through Probability Engineering: A Pragmatic Paradigm for Modern AI
Recent years have witnessed the rapid progression of deep learning, pushing us closer to the realization of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Probabilistic modeling is critical to many of these advancements, which provides a foundational framework for capturing data distributions. However, as the scale and complexity of AI applications grow, traditional probabilistic modeling faces escalating challenges, such as high-dimensional parameter spaces, heterogeneous data sources, and evolving real-world requirements often render classical approaches insufficiently flexible. This paper proposes a novel concept, Probability Engineering, which treats the already-learned probability distributions within deep learning as engineering artifacts. Rather than merely fitting or inferring distributions, we actively modify and reinforce them to better address the diverse and evolving demands of modern AI. Specifically, Probability Engineering introduces novel techniques and constraints to refine existing probability distributions, improving their robustness, efficiency, adaptability, or trustworthiness. We showcase this paradigm through a series of applications spanning Bayesian deep learning, Edge AI (including federated learning and knowledge distillation), and Generative AI (such as text-to-image generation with diffusion models and high-quality text generation with large language models). These case studies demonstrate how probability distributions once treated as static objects can be engineered to meet the diverse and evolving requirements of large-scale, data-intensive, and trustworthy AI systems. By systematically expanding and strengthening the role of probabilistic modeling, Probability Engineering paves the way for more robust, adaptive, efficient, and trustworthy deep learning solutions in today's fast-growing AI era.
Advancing Problem-Based Learning in Biomedical Engineering in the Era of Generative AI
Nnamdi, Micky C., Tamo, J. Ben, Shi, Wenqi, Wang, May D.
Problem-Based Learning (PBL) has significantly impacted biomedical engineering (BME) education since its introduction in the early 2000s, effectively enhancing critical thinking and real-world knowledge application among students. With biomedical engineering rapidly converging with artificial intelligence (AI), integrating effective AI education into established curricula has become challenging yet increasingly necessary. Recent advancements, including AI's recognition by the 2024 Nobel Prize, have highlighted the importance of training students comprehensively in biomedical AI. However, effective biomedical AI education faces substantial obstacles, such as diverse student backgrounds, limited personalized mentoring, constrained computational resources, and difficulties in safely scaling hands-on practical experiments due to privacy and ethical concerns associated with biomedical data. To overcome these issues, we conducted a three-year (2021-2023) case study implementing an advanced PBL framework tailored specifically for biomedical AI education, involving 92 undergraduate and 156 graduate students from the joint Biomedical Engineering program of Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. Our approach emphasizes collaborative, interdisciplinary problem-solving through authentic biomedical AI challenges. The implementation led to measurable improvements in learning outcomes, evidenced by high research productivity (16 student-authored publications), consistently positive peer evaluations, and successful development of innovative computational methods addressing real biomedical challenges. Additionally, we examined the role of generative AI both as a teaching subject and an educational support tool within the PBL framework. Our study presents a practical and scalable roadmap for biomedical engineering departments aiming to integrate robust AI education into their curricula.
Improved YOLOv12 with LLM-Generated Synthetic Data for Enhanced Apple Detection and Benchmarking Against YOLOv11 and YOLOv10
Sapkota, Ranjan, Karkee, Manoj
This study evaluated the performance of the YOLOv12 object detection model, and compared against the performances YOLOv11 and YOLOv10 for apple detection in commercial orchards based on the model training completed entirely on synthetic images generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). The YOLOv12n configuration achieved the highest precision at 0.916, the highest recall at 0.969, and the highest mean Average Precision (mAP@50) at 0.978. In comparison, the YOLOv11 series was led by YOLO11x, which achieved the highest precision at 0.857, recall at 0.85, and mAP@50 at 0.91. For the YOLOv10 series, YOLOv10b and YOLOv10l both achieved the highest precision at 0.85, with YOLOv10n achieving the highest recall at 0.8 and mAP@50 at 0.89. These findings demonstrated that YOLOv12, when trained on realistic LLM-generated datasets surpassed its predecessors in key performance metrics. The technique also offered a cost-effective solution by reducing the need for extensive manual data collection in the agricultural field. In addition, this study compared the computational efficiency of all versions of YOLOv12, v11 and v10, where YOLOv11n reported the lowest inference time at 4.7 ms, compared to YOLOv12n's 5.6 ms and YOLOv10n's 5.9 ms. Although YOLOv12 is new and more accurate than YOLOv11, and YOLOv10, YOLO11n still stays the fastest YOLO model among YOLOv10, YOLOv11 and YOLOv12 series of models. (Index: YOLOv12, YOLOv11, YOLOv10, YOLOv13, YOLOv14, YOLOv15, YOLOE, YOLO Object detection)
TikZero: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Graphics Program Synthesis
Belouadi, Jonas, Ilg, Eddy, Keuper, Margret, Tanaka, Hideki, Utiyama, Masao, Dabre, Raj, Eger, Steffen, Ponzetto, Simone Paolo
With the rise of generative AI, synthesizing figures from text captions becomes a compelling application. However, achieving high geometric precision and editability requires representing figures as graphics programs in languages like TikZ, and aligned training data (i.e., graphics programs with captions) remains scarce. Meanwhile, large amounts of unaligned graphics programs and captioned raster images are more readily available. We reconcile these disparate data sources by presenting TikZero, which decouples graphics program generation from text understanding by using image representations as an intermediary bridge. It enables independent training on graphics programs and captioned images and allows for zero-shot text-guided graphics program synthesis during inference. We show that our method substantially outperforms baselines that can only operate with caption-aligned graphics programs. Furthermore, when leveraging caption-aligned graphics programs as a complementary training signal, TikZero matches or exceeds the performance of much larger models, including commercial systems like GPT-4o. Our code, datasets, and select models are publicly available.
No, of course I can! Refusal Mechanisms Can Be Exploited Using Harmless Fine-Tuning Data
Kazdan, Joshua, Yu, Lisa, Schaeffer, Rylan, Cundy, Chris, Koyejo, Sanmi, Dvijotham, Krishnamurthy
Leading language model (LM) providers like OpenAI and Google offer fine-tuning APIs that allow customers to adapt LMs for specific use cases. To prevent misuse, these LM providers implement filtering mechanisms to block harmful fine-tuning data. Consequently, adversaries seeking to produce unsafe LMs via these APIs must craft adversarial training data that are not identifiably harmful. We make three contributions in this context: 1. We show that many existing attacks that use harmless data to create unsafe LMs rely on eliminating model refusals in the first few tokens of their responses. 2. We show that such prior attacks can be blocked by a simple defense that pre-fills the first few tokens from an aligned model before letting the fine-tuned model fill in the rest. 3. We describe a new data-poisoning attack, ``No, Of course I Can Execute'' (NOICE), which exploits an LM's formulaic refusal mechanism to elicit harmful responses. By training an LM to refuse benign requests on the basis of safety before fulfilling those requests regardless, we are able to jailbreak several open-source models and a closed-source model (GPT-4o). We show an attack success rate (ASR) of 57% against GPT-4o; our attack earned a Bug Bounty from OpenAI. Against open-source models protected by simple defenses, we improve ASRs by an average of 3.25 times compared to the best performing previous attacks that use only harmless data. NOICE demonstrates the exploitability of repetitive refusal mechanisms and broadens understanding of the threats closed-source models face from harmless data.
Model Risk Management for Generative AI In Financial Institutions
Bhattacharyya, Anwesha, Yu, Ye, Yang, Hanyu, Singh, Rahul, Joshi, Tarun, Chen, Jie, Yalavarthy, Kiran
The success of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2023 has spurred financial enterprises into exploring Generative AI applications to reduce costs or drive revenue within different lines of businesses in the Financial Industry. While these applications offer strong potential for efficiencies, they introduce new model risks, primarily hallucinations and toxicity. As highly regulated entities, financial enterprises (primarily large US banks) are obligated to enhance their model risk framework with additional testing and controls to ensure safe deployment of such applications. This paper outlines the key aspects for model risk management of generative AI model with a special emphasis on additional practices required in model validation.
ChatGPT or A Silent Everywhere Helper: A Survey of Large Language Models
Akhtarshenas, Azim, Dini, Afshin, Ayoobi, Navid
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revo lutionized natural language processing Natural Language Processing (NLP), with Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) standing out as a notable exampledue to its advanced capabilities and widespread applications. This survey provides a comprehensive analysis of ChatGPT, exploring its architecture, training processes, and functionalities. We examine its integration into various domains across industries such as customer service, education, healthcare, and entertainment. A comparative analysis with other LLMs highlights ChatGPT's unique features and performance metrics. Regarding benchmarks, the paper examines ChatGPT's comparative performance against other LLMs and discusses potential risks such as misinformation, bias, and data privacy concerns. Additionally, we offer a number of figures and tables that outline the backdrop of the discussion, the main ideas of the article, the numerous LLM models, a thorough list of datasets used for pre-training, fine-tuning, and evaluation, as well as particular LLM applications with pertinent references. Finally, we identify future research directions and technological advancements, underscoring the evolving landscape of LLMs and their profound impact on artificial intelligence Artificial Intelligence (AI) and society.
Teen's suicide turns mother against Google and AI chatbot startup
Megan Garcia says her son would still be alive today if it weren't for a chatbot urging the 14-year-old to take his own life. In a lawsuit with major implications for Silicon Valley, she is seeking to hold Google and the artificial intelligence firm Character Technologies responsible for his death. The case over the tragedy that unfolded a year ago in central Florida is an early test of who is legally to blame when kids' interactions with generative AI take an unexpected turn. Garcia's allegations are laid out in a 116-page complaint filed last year in federal court in Orlando. She is seeking unspecified monetary damages from Google and Character Technologies and asking the court to order warnings that the platform isn't suitable for minors and limit how it can collect and use their data.
Generative AI in Transportation Planning: A Survey
Da, Longchao, Chen, Tiejin, Li, Zhuoheng, Bachiraju, Shreyas, Yao, Huaiyuan, Li, Li, Dong, Yushun, Hu, Xiyang, Tu, Zhengzhong, Wang, Dongjie, Zhao, Yue, Xuanyu, null, Zhou, null, Pendyala, Ram, Stabler, Benjamin, Yang, Yezhou, Zhou, Xuesong, Wei, Hua
The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into transportation planning has the potential to revolutionize tasks such as demand forecasting, infrastructure design, policy evaluation, and traffic simulation. However, there is a critical need for a systematic framework to guide the adoption of GenAI in this interdisciplinary domain. In this survey, we, a multidisciplinary team of researchers spanning computer science and transportation engineering, present the first comprehensive framework for leveraging GenAI in transportation planning. Specifically, we introduce a new taxonomy that categorizes existing applications and methodologies into two perspectives: transportation planning tasks and computational techniques. From the transportation planning perspective, we examine the role of GenAI in automating descriptive, predictive, generative, simulation, and explainable tasks to enhance mobility systems. From the computational perspective, we detail advancements in data preparation, domain-specific fine-tuning, and inference strategies, such as retrieval-augmented generation and zero-shot learning tailored to transportation applications. Additionally, we address critical challenges, including data scarcity, explainability, bias mitigation, and the development of domain-specific evaluation frameworks that align with transportation goals like sustainability, equity, and system efficiency. This survey aims to bridge the gap between traditional transportation planning methodologies and modern AI techniques, fostering collaboration and innovation. By addressing these challenges and opportunities, we seek to inspire future research that ensures ethical, equitable, and impactful use of generative AI in transportation planning.