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US judge dismisses Musk's xAI trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI

Al Jazeera

US judge dismisses Musk's xAI trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI A United States federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI that accused rival Sam Altman's OpenAI of stealing trade secrets for chatbots. US District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco said on Monday that xAI failed to show that OpenAI induced former xAI senior engineer Xuechen Li to divulge confidential information related to its Grok chatbot, or that OpenAI engineers knew Li might have disclosed any. She dismissed an earlier version in February. The lawsuit originally filed last September focused on broader alleged misappropriation of confidential information, including source code, by xAI employees who left for jobs at OpenAI. Monday's decision is Musk's second legal loss against OpenAI in four weeks. On May 18, a federal jury ruled against Musk, the world's richest person, in his $150bn lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Altman of "stealing a charity" by betraying the company's original mission as a nonprofit to enrich themselves.



Training-free Detection of AI-generated images via Cropping Robustness

Neural Information Processing Systems

AI-generated image detection has become crucial with the rapid advancement of vision-generative models. Instead of training detectors tailored to specific datasets, we study a training-free approach leveraging self-supervised models without requiring prior data knowledge. These models, pre-trained with augmentations like RandomResizedCrop, learn to produce consistent representations across varying resolutions. Motivated by this, we propose WaRPAD, a training-free AI-generated image detection algorithm based on self-supervised models. Since neighborhood pixel differences in images are highly sensitive to resizing operations, WaRPAD first defines a base score function that quantifies the sensitivity of image embeddings to perturbations along high-frequency directions extracted via Haar wavelet decomposition.


BikeBench: ABicycle Design Benchmark for Generative Models with Objectives and Constraints

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce BikeBench, an engineering design benchmark for evaluating generative models on problems with multiple real-world objectives and constraints. As generative AI's reach continues to grow, evaluating its capability to understand physical laws, human guidelines, and hard constraints grows increasingly important. Engineering product design lies at the intersection of these difficult tasks, providing new challenges for AI capabilities. BikeBench evaluates AI models' capabilities to generate bicycle designs that not only resemble the dataset, but meet specific performance objectives and constraints. To do so, BikeBench quantifies a variety of human-centered and multiphysics performance characteristics, such as aerodynamics, ergonomics, structural mechanics, human-rated usability, and similarity to subjective text or image prompts. Supporting the benchmark are several datasets of simulation results, a dataset of 10,000 human-rated bicycle assessments, and a synthetically generated dataset of 1.6M designs, each with a parametric, CAD/XML, SVG, and PNG representation. BikeBench is uniquely configured to evaluate tabular generative models, large language models (LLMs), design optimization, and hybrid algorithms side-by-side. Our experiments indicate that LLMs and tabular generative models fall short of hybrid GenAI+optimization algorithms in design quality, constraint satisfaction, and similarity scores, suggesting significant room for improvement. We hope that BikeBench, a first-of-its-kind benchmark, will help catalyze progress in generative AI for constrained multi-objective engineering design problems.


Doctor Approved: Generating Medically Accurate Skin Disease Images through AI-Expert Feedback

Neural Information Processing Systems

Paucity of medical data severely limits the generalizability of diagnostic ML models, as the full spectrum of disease variability can not be represented by a small clinical dataset. To address this, diffusion models (DMs) have been considered as a promising avenue for synthetic image generation and augmentation. However, they frequently produce medically inaccurate images, deteriorating the model performance. Expert domain knowledge is critical for synthesizing images that correctly encode clinical information, especially when data is scarce and quality outweighs quantity. Existing approaches for incorporating human feedback, such as reinforcement learning (RL) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), rely on robust reward functions or demand labor-intensive expert evaluations. Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) reveals their strong visual reasoning capabilities, making them adept candidates as evaluators. In this work, we propose a novel framework, coined MAGIC (Medically Accurate Generation of Images through AI-Expert Collaboration), that synthesizes clinically accurate skin disease images for data augmentation.


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Neural Information Processing Systems

Protein design is a fundamental challenge in biotechnology, aiming to design novel sequences with specific functions within the vast space of possible proteins. Recent advances in deep generative models have enabled function-based protein design from textual descriptions, yet struggle with structural plausibility. Inspired by classical protein design methods that leverage natural protein structures, we explore whether incorporating fragments from natural proteins can enhance foldability in generative models. Our empirical results show that even random incorporation of fragments improves foldability. Building on this insight, we introduce PRODVA, a novel protein design approach that integrates a text encoder for functional descriptions, a protein language model for designing proteins, and a fragment encoder to dynamically retrieve protein fragments based on textual functional descriptions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively designs protein sequences that are both functionally aligned and structurally plausible. Compared to state-of-the-art models, PRODVA achieves comparable function alignment using less than 0.04% of the training data, while designing significantly more well-folded proteins, with the proportion of proteins having pLDDT above 70 increasing by 7.38% and those with PAE below 10 increasing by 9.62%. 1


On the Closed-Form of Flow Matching: Generalization Does Not Arise from Target Stochasticity

Neural Information Processing Systems

Modern deep generative models can now produce high-quality synthetic samples that are often indistinguishable from real training data. A growing body of research aims to understand why recent methods, such as diffusion and flow matching techniques, generalize so effectively. Among the proposed explanations are the inductive biases of deep learning architectures and the stochastic nature of the conditional flow matching loss. In this work, we rule out the noisy nature of the loss as a key factor driving generalization in flow matching. First, we empirically show that in high-dimensional settings, the stochastic and closed-form versions of the flow matching loss yield nearly equivalent losses. Then, using state-of-the-art flow matching models on standard image datasets, we demonstrate that both variants achieve comparable statistical performance, with the surprising observation that using the closed-form can even improve performance.


Failure Prediction at Runtime for Generative Robot Policies

Neural Information Processing Systems

Imitation learning (IL) with generative models, such as diffusion and flow matching, has enabled robots to perform complex, long-horizon tasks. However, distribution shifts from unseen environments or compounding action errors can still cause unpredictable and unsafe behavior, leading to task failure. Therefore, early failure prediction during runtime is essential for deploying robots in human-centered and safety-critical environments. We propose FIPER, a general framework for Failure Prediction at Runtime for generative IL policies that does not require failure data. FIPER identifies two key indicators of impending failure: (i) out-ofdistribution (OOD) observations detected via random network distillation in the policy's embedding space, and (ii) high uncertainty in generated actions measured by a novel action-chunk entropy score.


Efficient Utility-Preserving Machine Unlearning with Implicit Gradient Surgery

Neural Information Processing Systems

Machine unlearning (MU) aims to efficiently remove sensitive or harmful memory from a pre-trained model. The key challenge is to balance the potential tradeoff between unlearning efficacy and utility preservation, which involves forgetting undesirable information as defined while maintaining the model's original performance. One potential way to tackle this problem is to use multi-objective optimization to jointly optimize both the unlearning and utility preservation objectives. However, existing multi-objective methods only guarantee finding a Pareto-optimal solution without fine-grained control, which causes under-optimization of the unlearning objective. To this end, we first model MU as a constrained optimization problem, that is, optimizing the unlearning objective under the constraint of a bounded increase for utility loss.


BountyBench: Dollar Impact of AI Agent Attackers and Defenders on Real-World Cybersecurity Systems

Neural Information Processing Systems

AI agents have the potential to significantly alter the cybersecurity landscape. Here, we introduce the first framework to capture offensive and defensive cyber-capabilities in evolving real-world systems. Instantiating this framework with BountyBench, we set up 25 systems with complex, real-world codebases. To capture the vulnerability lifecycle, we define three task types: Detect (detecting a new vulnerability), Exploit (exploiting a given vulnerability), and Patch (patching a given vulnerability). For Detect, we construct a new success indicator, which is general across vulnerability types and provides localized evaluation. We manually set up the environment for each system, including installing packages, setting up server(s), and hydrating database(s). We add 40 bug bounties, which are vulnerabilities with monetary awards from \\$10 to \\$30,485, covering 9 of the OWASP Top 10 Risks. To modulate task difficulty, we devise a new strategy based on information to guide detection, interpolating from identifying a zero day to exploiting a given vulnerability. We evaluate 10 agents: Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI with o3-high and o4-mini, and custom agents with o3-high, GPT-4.1,