We present the results of the "Fast Calorimeter Simulation Challenge 2022" -- the CaloChallenge. We study state-of-the-art generative models on four calorimeter shower datasets of increasing dimensionality, ranging from a few hundred voxels to a few tens of thousand voxels. The 31 individual submissions span a wide range of current popular generative architectures, including Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Normalizing Flows, Diffusion models, and models based on Conditional Flow Matching. We compare all submissions in terms of quality of generated calorimeter showers, as well as shower generation time and model size. To assess the quality we use a broad range of different metrics including differences in 1-dimensional histograms of observables, KPD/FPD scores, AUCs of binary classifiers, and the log-posterior of a multiclass classifier. The results of the CaloChallenge provide the most complete and comprehensive survey of cutting-edge approaches to calorimeter fast simulation to date. In addition, our work provides a uniquely detailed perspective on the important problem of how to evaluate generative models. As such, the results presented here should be applicable for other domains that use generative AI and require fast and faithful generation of samples in a large phase space.

Education is being transformed by rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), including emerging Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI). Such technology can significantly support academics and students by automating monotonous tasks and making personalised suggestions. However, despite the potential of the technology, there are significant concerns regarding AI misuse, particularly by students in assessments. There are two schools of thought: one advocates for a complete ban on it, while the other views it as a valuable educational tool, provided it is governed by a robust usage policy. This contradiction clearly indicates a major policy gap in academic practices, and new policies are required to uphold academic standards while enabling staff and students to benefit from technological advancements. We surveyed 117 academics from three countries (UK, UAE, and Iraq), and identified that most academics retain positive opinions regarding AI in education. For example, the majority of experienced academics do not favour complete bans, and they see the potential benefits of AI for students, teaching staff, and academic institutions. Importantly, academics specifically identified the particular benefits of AI for autonomous assessment (71.79% of respondents agreed). Therefore, for the first time, we propose a novel AI framework for autonomously evaluating students' work (e.g., reports, coursework, etc.) and automatically assigning grades based on their knowledge and in-depth understanding of the submitted content. The survey results further highlight a significant lack of awareness of modern AI-based tools (e.g., ChatGPT) among experienced academics, a gap that must be addressed to uphold educational standards.

To analyse how diffusion models learn correlations beyond Gaussian ones, we study the behaviour of higher-order cumulants, or connected n-point functions, under both the forward and backward process. We derive explicit expressions for the moment- and cumulant-generating functionals, in terms of the distribution of the initial data and properties of forward process. It is shown analytically that during the forward process higher-order cumulants are conserved in models without a drift, such as the variance-expanding scheme, and that therefore the endpoint of the forward process maintains nontrivial correlations. We demonstrate that since these correlations are encoded in the score function, higher-order cumulants are learnt in the backward process, also when starting from a normal prior. We confirm our analytical results in an exactly solvable toy model with nonzero cumulants and in scalar lattice field theory.

Synthetic data augmentation via large language models (LLMs) allows researchers to leverage additional training data, thus enhancing the performance of downstream tasks, especially when real-world data is scarce. However, the generated data can deviate from the real-world data, and this misalignment can bring deficient outcomes while applying the trained model to applications. Therefore, we proposed efficient weighted-loss approaches to align synthetic data with realworld distribution by emphasizing high-quality and diversified data generated by LLMs with using merely a little real-world data. We empirically assessed the effectiveness of our method on multiple text classification tasks, and the results showed leveraging our approaches on a BERT-level model robustly outperformed standard cross-entropy and other data weighting approaches, providing potential solutions to effectively leveraging synthetic data from any suitable data generator for model training. The quantity and quality of data play a significant role in many tasks of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, due to the scarcity of data in a particular domain for a specific task, we may need expertise to collect such data, resulting in budget limitations. Fortunately, Large language models (LLMs) provide a practical solution to this problem. LLMs, such as GPT series (Brown et al., 2020; OpenAI, 2022; OpenAI et al., 2024), can be leveraged to generate synthetic data that mimics real-world examples, thereby enriching the training set (Wang et al., 2023). However, training models with LLM-generated data can lead to drawbacks such as model collapse (Shumailov et al., 2023; Dohmatob et al., 2024), tail phenomena, reinforcing LM biases (Wang et al., 2023). Moreover, based on our empirical study, the performance of models trained on synthetic data without proper processing can be lower than models trained on much smaller real-world data (Sec. Previous works took data filtering strategy to get high quality or variant data (Dubey et al., 2024; MetaAI, 2024; Chiang et al., 2023; West et al., 2022).

Post-training of pre-trained LLMs, which typically consists of the supervised finetuning (SFT) stage and the preference learning (RLHF or DPO) stage, is crucial to effective and safe LLM applications. The widely adopted approach in posttraining popular open-source LLMs is to sequentially perform SFT and RLHF/DPO. However, sequential training is sub-optimal in terms of SFT and RLHF/DPO tradeoff: the LLM gradually forgets about the first stage's training when undergoing the second stage's training. We theoretically prove the sub-optimality of sequential post-training. Furthermore, we propose a practical joint post-training framework with theoretical convergence guarantees and empirically outperforms sequential post-training framework, while having similar computational cost. Recent years have witnessed the great capabilities of large language models (LLMs) trained on a large corpus of datasets (OpenAI, 2022; Dubey et al., 2024; Abdin et al., 2024). These models have been applied to a wide range of tasks including virtual assistant (OpenAI, 2022), code development (Roziere et al., 2023), and education/research (Achiam et al., 2023). Typically LLMs undergo the pre-training phase and the post-training phase.

Generative AI agents, software systems powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are emerging as a promising approach to automate cybersecurity tasks. Among the others, penetration testing is a challenging field due to the task complexity and the diverse strategies to simulate cyber-attacks. Despite growing interest and initial studies in automating penetration testing with generative agents, there remains a significant gap in the form of a comprehensive and standard framework for their evaluation and development. This paper introduces AutoPenBench, an open benchmark for evaluating generative agents in automated penetration testing. We present a comprehensive framework that includes 33 tasks, each representing a vulnerable system that the agent has to attack. Tasks are of increasing difficulty levels, including in-vitro and real-world scenarios. We assess the agent performance with generic and specific milestones that allow us to compare results in a standardised manner and understand the limits of the agent under test. We show the benefits of AutoPenBench by testing two agent architectures: a fully autonomous and a semi-autonomous supporting human interaction. We compare their performance and limitations. For example, the fully autonomous agent performs unsatisfactorily achieving a 21% Success Rate (SR) across the benchmark, solving 27% of the simple tasks and only one real-world task. In contrast, the assisted agent demonstrates substantial improvements, with 64% of SR. AutoPenBench allows us also to observe how different LLMs like GPT-4o or OpenAI o1 impact the ability of the agents to complete the tasks. We believe that our benchmark fills the gap with a standard and flexible framework to compare penetration testing agents on a common ground. We hope to extend AutoPenBench along with the research community by making it available under https://github.com/lucagioacchini/auto-pen-bench.

In the current era of social media and generative AI, an ability to automatically assess the credibility of online social media content is of tremendous importance. Credibility assessment is fundamentally based on aggregating credibility signals, which refer to small units of information, such as content factuality, bias, or a presence of persuasion techniques, into an overall credibility score. Credibility signals provide a more granular, more easily explainable and widely utilizable information in contrast to currently predominant fake news detection, which utilizes various (mostly latent) features. A growing body of research on automatic credibility assessment and detection of credibility signals can be characterized as highly fragmented and lacking mutual interconnections. This issue is even more prominent due to a lack of an up-to-date overview of research works on automatic credibility assessment. In this survey, we provide such systematic and comprehensive literature review of 175 research papers while focusing on textual credibility signals and Natural Language Processing (NLP), which undergoes a significant advancement due to Large Language Models (LLMs). While positioning the NLP research into the context of other multidisciplinary research works, we tackle with approaches for credibility assessment as well as with 9 categories of credibility signals (we provide a thorough analysis for 3 of them, namely: 1) factuality, subjectivity and bias, 2) persuasion techniques and logical fallacies, and 3) claims and veracity). Following the description of the existing methods, datasets and tools, we identify future challenges and opportunities, while paying a specific attention to recent rapid development of generative AI.

The applications of generative AI have become extremely impressive, and the interplay between users and AI is even more so. Current human-AI interaction literature has taken a broad look at how humans interact with generative AI, but it lacks specificity regarding the user interface designs and patterns used to create these applications. Therefore, we present a survey that comprehensively presents taxonomies of how a human interacts with AI and the user interaction patterns designed to meet the needs of a variety of relevant use cases. We focus primarily on user-guided interactions, surveying interactions that are initiated by the user and do not include any implicit signals given by the user. With this survey, we aim to create a compendium of different user-interaction patterns that can be used as a reference for designers and developers alike. In doing so, we also strive to lower the entry barrier for those attempting to learn more about the design of generative AI applications.

Given the pace at which generative A.I. tools have flooded the market and the much slower rate at which school districts and universities develop new policies, it was only a matter of time before a case focused on A.I. and cheating made its way to court. That day came on Tuesday, when an attorney asked a federal judge to require Hingham High School, in Massachusetts, to raise the AP U.S. History grade of a student who had been penalized for allegedly using A.I. to research and outline a class project. The attorney for the student argued that because the school had no A.I. policy in the student handbook, using A.I. wasn't cheating--and that the low grade the student received in that course would unfairly prevent him from applying to selective colleges. Hingham school officials have argued that the use of A.I. was clearly prohibited by policies laid out in class and by existing policies against plagiarism. The case against the Hingham school system turns on the question of whether what the student did constituted cheating, according to the existing school policies: Were students allowed to use A.I. tools as these students did, or not? And is it, in fact, plagiarism to use research and an outline generated by a chatbot?

Objective: This article offers a taxonomy of generative artificial intelligence (AI) for health economics and outcomes research (HEOR), explores its emerging applications, and outlines methods to enhance the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated outputs. Methods: The review defines foundational generative AI concepts and highlights current HEOR applications, including systematic literature reviews, health economic modeling, real-world evidence generation, and dossier development. Approaches such as prompt engineering (zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, persona pattern prompting), retrieval-augmented generation, model fine-tuning, and the use of domain-specific models are introduced to improve AI accuracy and reliability. Results: Generative AI shows significant potential in HEOR, enhancing efficiency, productivity, and offering novel solutions to complex challenges. Foundation models are promising in automating complex tasks, though challenges remain in scientific reliability, bias, interpretability, and workflow integration. The article discusses strategies to improve the accuracy of these AI tools. Conclusion: Generative AI could transform HEOR by increasing efficiency and accuracy across various applications. However, its full potential can only be realized by building HEOR expertise and addressing the limitations of current AI technologies. As AI evolves, ongoing research and innovation will shape its future role in the field.