The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), comprising large language models, text-to-image generators, and AI algorithms for medical drug and material design, had a transformative impact on society. However, despite an initial exponential growth surpassing Moore's law, progress is now plateauing, suggesting we are approaching the limits of current technology. Indeed, these models are notoriously data-hungry, prone to overfitting, and challenging to direct during the generative process, hampering their effective professional employment. To cope with these limitations, we propose a paradigm shift in GenAI by introducing an ab initio method based on the minimal maximum entropy principle. Our approach does not fit the data. Instead, it compresses information in the training set by finding a latent representation parameterized by arbitrary nonlinear functions, such as neural networks. The result is a general physics-driven model, which is data-efficient, resistant to overfitting, and flexible, permitting to control and influence the generative process. Benchmarking shows that our method outperforms variational autoencoders (VAEs) with similar neural architectures, particularly on undersampled datasets. We demonstrate the methods effectiveness in generating images, even with limited training data, and its unprecedented capability to customize the generation process a posteriori without the need of any fine-tuning or retraining.

In an era of increasingly capable foundation models, job seekers are turning to generative AI tools to enhance their application materials. However, unequal access to and knowledge about generative AI tools can harm both employers and candidates by reducing the accuracy of hiring decisions and giving some candidates an unfair advantage. To address these challenges, we introduce a new variant of the strategic classification framework tailored to manipulations performed using large language models, accommodating varying levels of manipulations and stochastic outcomes. We propose a ``two-ticket'' scheme, where the hiring algorithm applies an additional manipulation to each submitted resume and considers this manipulated version together with the original submitted resume. We establish theoretical guarantees for this scheme, showing improvements for both the fairness and accuracy of hiring decisions when the true positive rate is maximized subject to a no false positives constraint. We further generalize this approach to an $n$-ticket scheme and prove that hiring outcomes converge to a fixed, group-independent decision, eliminating disparities arising from differential LLM access. Finally, we empirically validate our framework and the performance of our two-ticket scheme on real resumes using an open-source resume screening tool.

Generative AI (GenAI) has revolutionized data-driven modeling by enabling the synthesis of high-dimensional data across various applications, including image generation, language modeling, biomedical signal processing, and anomaly detection. Flow-based generative models provide a powerful framework for capturing complex probability distributions, offering exact likelihood estimation, efficient sampling, and deterministic transformations between distributions. These models leverage invertible mappings governed by Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs), enabling precise density estimation and likelihood evaluation. This tutorial presents an intuitive mathematical framework for flow-based generative models, formulating them as neural network-based representations of continuous probability densities. We explore key theoretical principles, including the Wasserstein metric, gradient flows, and density evolution governed by ODEs, to establish convergence guarantees and bridge empirical advancements with theoretical insights. By providing a rigorous yet accessible treatment, we aim to equip researchers and practitioners with the necessary tools to effectively apply flow-based generative models in signal processing and machine learning.

Generative artificial intelligence, particularly through large language models (LLMs), is poised to transform energy optimization and demand side management (DSM) within microgrids. This paper explores the integration of LLMs into energy management, emphasizing their roles in automating the optimization of DSM strategies with Internet of electric vehicles. We investigate challenges and solutions associated with DSM and explore the new opportunities presented by leveraging LLMs. Then, we propose an innovative solution that enhances LLMs with retrieval-augmented generation for automatic problem formulation, code generation, and customizing optimization. We present a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution in charging scheduling and optimization for electric vehicles, highlighting our solution's significant advancements in energy efficiency and user adaptability. This work underscores the potential of LLMs for energy optimization and fosters a new era of intelligent DSM solutions.

Warning: This paper contains potentially offensive and harmful text. Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently extended their powerful reasoning capabilities to safety checks--using chain-of-thought reasoning to decide whether a request should be answered. While this new approach offers a promising route for balancing model utility and safety, its robustness remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Malicious-Educator, a benchmark that disguises extremely dangerous or malicious requests beneath seemingly legitimate educational prompts. Our experiments reveal severe security flaws in popular commercial-grade LRMs, including OpenAI o1/o3, DeepSeek-R1, and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. For instance, although OpenAI's o1 model initially maintains a high refusal rate of about 98%, subsequent model updates significantly compromise its safety; and attackers can easily extract criminal strategies from DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking without any additional tricks. To further highlight these vulnerabilities, we propose Hijacking Chain-of-Thought (H-CoT), a universal and transferable attack method that leverages the model's own displayed intermediate reasoning to jailbreak its safety reasoning mechanism. Under H-CoT, refusal rates sharply decline--dropping from 98% to below 2%--and, in some instances, even transform initially cautious tones into ones that are willing to provide harmful content. We hope these findings underscore the urgent need for more robust safety mechanisms to preserve the benefits of advanced reasoning capabilities without compromising ethical standards.

Chinese artificial intelligence chatbot DeepSeek upended the global industry and wiped billions off U.S. tech stocks when it unveiled its R1 program, which it claims was built on cheap, less sophisticated Nvidia semiconductors. But governments from Rome to Seoul are cracking down on the user-friendly Chinese app, saying they need to prevent potential leaks of sensitive information through generative AI services. Here is a look at what's going on:

It was a huge sum - but less than the 157bn the firm was valued at in a funding round just four months ago, and much lower than the 300bn that some think it is worth now. Complicating all of this is OpenAI's unusual structure which involves a partnership between non-profit and for-profit arms. Mr Altman is understood to want to change that, stripping it of its non-profit board. That involves costs which Mr Musk is seemingly trying to inflate. "What Musk is trying to do here is raise the perceived value of the non-profit arm of OpenAI, so that OpenAI has to pay more to get out of the obligations it has to its own non-profit," said Dr Penn.

Simulation-based testing is widely used to assess the reliability of Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS), but its effectiveness is limited by the operational design domain (ODD) conditions available in such simulators. To address this limitation, in this work, we explore the integration of generative artificial intelligence techniques with physics-based simulators to enhance ADS system-level testing. Our study evaluates the effectiveness and computational overhead of three generative strategies based on diffusion models, namely instruction-editing, inpainting, and inpainting with refinement. Specifically, we assess these techniques' capabilities to produce augmented simulator-generated images of driving scenarios representing new ODDs. We employ a novel automated detector for invalid inputs based on semantic segmentation to ensure semantic preservation and realism of the neural generated images. We then perform system-level testing to evaluate the ADS's generalization ability to newly synthesized ODDs. Our findings show that diffusion models help increase the ODD coverage for system-level testing of ADS. Our automated semantic validator achieved a percentage of false positives as low as 3%, retaining the correctness and quality of the generated images for testing. Our approach successfully identified new ADS system failures before real-world testing.

--Phishing is the most prevalent type of cyber-attack today and is recognized as the leading source of data breaches with significant consequences for both individuals and corporations. Web-based phishing attacks are the most frequent with vectors such as social media posts and emails containing links to phishing URLs that once clicked on render host systems vulnerable to more sinister attacks. Research efforts to detect phishing URLs have involved the use of supervised learning techniques that use large amounts of data to train models and have high computational requirements. They also involve analysis of features derived from vectors including email contents thus affecting user privacy. Additionally, they suffer from a lack of resilience against evolution of threats especially with the advent of generative AI techniques to bypass these systems as with AI-generated phishing URLs. Unsupervised methods such as clustering techniques have also been used in phishing detection in the past, however, they are at times unscalable due to the use of pair-wise comparisons. They also lack high detection rates while detecting phishing campaigns. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning approach that is not only fast but scalable, as it does not involve pair-wise comparisons. It is able to detect entire campaigns at a time with a high detection rate while preserving user privacy; this includes the recent surge of campaigns with targeted phishing URLs generated by malicious entities using generative AI techniques.

Smart contracts are essential to decentralized finance (DeFi) and blockchain ecosystems but are increasingly vulnerable to exploits due to coding errors and complex attack vectors. Traditional static analysis tools and existing vulnerability detection methods often fail to address these challenges comprehensively, leading to high false-positive rates and an inability to detect dynamic vulnerabilities. This paper introduces SmartLLM, a novel approach leveraging fine-tuned LLaMA 3.1 models with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of smart contract auditing. By integrating domain-specific knowledge from ERC standards and employing advanced techniques such as QLoRA for efficient fine-tuning, SmartLLM achieves superior performance compared to static analysis tools like Mythril and Slither, as well as zero-shot large language model (LLM) prompting methods such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Experimental results demonstrate a perfect recall of 100% and an accuracy score of 70%, highlighting the model's robustness in identifying vulnerabilities, including reentrancy and access control issues. This research advances smart contract security by offering a scalable and effective auditing solution, supporting the secure adoption of decentralized applications.