Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can reshape education and learning. While large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT dominate current educational research, multimodal capabilities, such as text-to-speech and text-to-image, are less explored. This study uses topic modeling to map the research landscape of multimodal and generative AI in education. An extensive literature search using Dimensions.ai yielded 4175 articles. Employing a topic modeling approach, latent topics were extracted, resulting in 38 interpretable topics organized into 14 thematic areas. Findings indicate a predominant focus on text-to-text models in educational contexts, with other modalities underexplored, overlooking the broader potential of multimodal approaches. The results suggest a research gap, stressing the importance of more balanced attention across different AI modalities and educational levels. In summary, this research provides an overview of current trends in generative AI for education, underlining opportunities for future exploration of multimodal technologies to fully realize the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in education.

In developing machine learning (ML) models for text classification, one common challenge is that the collected data is often not ideally distributed, especially when new classes are introduced in response to changes of data and tasks. In this paper, we present a solution for using visual analytics (VA) to guide the generation of synthetic data using large language models. As VA enables model developers to identify data-related deficiency, data synthesis can be targeted to address such deficiency. We discuss different types of data deficiency, describe different VA techniques for supporting their identification, and demonstrate the effectiveness of targeted data synthesis in improving model accuracy. In addition, we present a software tool, iGAiVA, which maps four groups of ML tasks into four VA views, integrating generative AI and VA into an ML workflow for developing and improving text classification models.

Biomarker discovery is vital in advancing personalized medicine, offering insights into disease diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutic efficacy. Traditionally, the identification and validation of biomarkers heavily depend on extensive experiments and statistical analyses. These approaches are time-consuming, demand extensive domain expertise, and are constrained by the complexity of biological systems. These limitations motivate us to ask: Can we automatically identify the effective biomarker subset without substantial human efforts? Inspired by the success of generative AI, we think that the intricate knowledge of biomarker identification can be compressed into a continuous embedding space, thus enhancing the search for better biomarkers. Thus, we propose a new biomarker identification framework with two important modules:1) training data preparation and 2) embedding-optimization-generation. The first module uses a multi-agent system to automatically collect pairs of biomarker subsets and their corresponding prediction accuracy as training data. These data establish a strong knowledge base for biomarker identification. The second module employs an encoder-evaluator-decoder learning paradigm to compress the knowledge of the collected data into a continuous space. Then, it utilizes gradient-based search techniques and autoregressive-based reconstruction to efficiently identify the optimal subset of biomarkers. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets to show the efficiency, robustness, and effectiveness of our method.

As generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), become increasingly integrated into production applications, new attack surfaces and vulnerabilities emerge and put a focus on adversarial threats in natural language and multi-modal systems. Red-teaming has gained importance in proactively identifying weaknesses in these systems, while blue-teaming works to protect against such adversarial attacks. Despite growing academic interest in adversarial risks for generative AI, there is limited guidance tailored for practitioners to assess and mitigate these challenges in real-world environments. To address this, our contributions include: (1) a practical examination of red- and blue-teaming strategies for securing generative AI, (2) identification of key challenges and open questions in defense development and evaluation, and (3) the Attack Atlas, an intuitive framework that brings a practical approach to analyzing single-turn input attacks, placing it at the forefront for practitioners. This work aims to bridge the gap between academic insights and practical security measures for the protection of generative AI systems.

Low back pain (LBP) is a leading cause of disability globally. Following the onset of LBP and subsequent treatment, adequate patient education is crucial for improving functionality and long-term outcomes. Despite advancements in patient education strategies, significant gaps persist in delivering personalized, evidence-based information to patients with LBP. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) have demonstrated the potential to enhance patient education. However, their application and efficacy in delivering educational content to patients with LBP remain underexplored and warrant further investigation. In this study, we introduce a novel approach utilizing LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and few-shot learning to generate tailored educational materials for patients with LBP. Physical therapists manually evaluated our model responses for redundancy, accuracy, and completeness using a Likert scale. In addition, the readability of the generated education materials is assessed using the Flesch Reading Ease score. The findings demonstrate that RAG-based LLMs outperform traditional LLMs, providing more accurate, complete, and readable patient education materials with less redundancy. Having said that, our analysis reveals that the generated materials are not yet ready for use in clinical practice. This study underscores the potential of AI-driven models utilizing RAG to improve patient education for LBP; however, significant challenges remain in ensuring the clinical relevance and granularity of content generated by these models.

Given the popularity of generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) often consume hundreds or thousands of GPUs for parallelizing and accelerating the training process. Communication overhead becomes more pronounced when training LLMs at scale. To eliminate communication overhead in distributed LLM training, we propose Domino, which provides a generic scheme to hide communication behind computation. By breaking data dependency of a single batch training into smaller independent pieces, Domino pipelines these independent pieces training and provides generic strategy of fine-grained communication and computation overlapping. Extensive results show that, comparing with Megatron-LM, Domino achieves up to 1.3x speedup for LLM training on Nvidia DGX-H100 GPUs.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various natural language tasks and are increasingly being applied in healthcare domains. This work demonstrates a new LLM-powered disease risk assessment approach via streaming human-AI conversation, eliminating the need for programming required by traditional machine learning approaches. In a COVID-19 severity risk assessment case study, we fine-tune pre-trained generative LLMs (e.g., Llama2-7b and Flan-t5-xl) using a few shots of natural language examples, comparing their performance with traditional classifiers (i.e., Logistic Regression, XGBoost, Random Forest) that are trained de novo using tabular data across various experimental settings. We develop a mobile application that uses these fine-tuned LLMs as its generative AI (GenAI) core to facilitate real-time interaction between clinicians and patients, providing no-code risk assessment through conversational interfaces. This integration not only allows for the use of streaming Questions and Answers (QA) as inputs but also offers personalized feature importance analysis derived from the LLM's attention layers, enhancing the interpretability of risk assessments. By achieving high Area Under the Curve (AUC) scores with a limited number of fine-tuning samples, our results demonstrate the potential of generative LLMs to outperform discriminative classification methods in low-data regimes, highlighting their real-world adaptability and effectiveness. This work aims to fill the existing gap in leveraging generative LLMs for interactive no-code risk assessment and to encourage further research in this emerging field.

Multi-modal generative AI has received increasing attention in both academia and industry. Particularly, two dominant families of techniques are: i) The multi-modal large language model (MLLM) such as GPT-4V, which shows impressive ability for multi-modal understanding; ii) The diffusion model such as Sora, which exhibits remarkable multi-modal powers, especially with respect to visual generation. As such, one natural question arises: Is it possible to have a unified model for both understanding and generation? To answer this question, in this paper, we first provide a detailed review of both MLLM and diffusion models, including their probabilistic modeling procedure, multi-modal architecture design, and advanced applications to image/video large language models as well as text-to-image/video generation. Then, we discuss the two important questions on the unified model: i) whether the unified model should adopt the auto-regressive or diffusion probabilistic modeling, and ii) whether the model should utilize a dense architecture or the Mixture of Experts(MoE) architectures to better support generation and understanding, two objectives. We further provide several possible strategies for building a unified model and analyze their potential advantages and disadvantages. We also summarize existing large-scale multi-modal datasets for better model pretraining in the future. To conclude the paper, we present several challenging future directions, which we believe can contribute to the ongoing advancement of multi-modal generative AI.

The growing reliance on data-driven decision-making highlights the need for more intuitive ways to access and analyze information stored in relational databases. However, the requirement of SQL knowledge has long been a significant barrier for non-technical users. This article introduces an innovative solution that leverages Generative AI to bridge this gap, enabling users to query databases using natural language. Our approach automatically translates natural language queries into SQL, ensuring both syntactic and semantic correctness, while also generating clear, natural language responses from the retrieved data. By streamlining the interaction between users and databases, this method empowers individuals without technical expertise to engage with data directly and efficiently, democratizing access to valuable insights and enhancing productivity.

The resurgence and rapid advancement of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in 2023 has catalyzed transformative shifts across numerous industry sectors, including urban transportation and logistics. This study investigates the evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4 and Phi-3-mini, to enhance transportation planning. The study assesses the performance and spatial comprehension of these models through a transportation-informed evaluation framework that includes general geospatial skills, general transportation domain skills, and real-world transportation problem-solving. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, the research encompasses an evaluation of the LLMs' general Geographic Information System (GIS) skills, general transportation domain knowledge as well as abilities to support human decision-making in the real-world transportation planning scenarios of congestion pricing. Results indicate that GPT-4 demonstrates superior accuracy and reliability across various GIS and transportation-specific tasks compared to Phi-3-mini, highlighting its potential as a robust tool for transportation planners. Nonetheless, Phi-3-mini exhibits competence in specific analytical scenarios, suggesting its utility in resource-constrained environments. The findings underscore the transformative potential of GenAI technologies in urban transportation planning. Future work could explore the application of newer LLMs and the impact of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques, on a broader set of real-world transportation planning and operations challenges, to deepen the integration of advanced AI models in transportation management practices.