Microsoft has relinquished its seat on the board of OpenAI, saying its participation is no longer needed because the ChatGPT maker has improved its governance since being roiled by boardroom chaos last year. In a Tuesday letter, Microsoft confirmed it was resigning, "effective immediately," from its role as an observer on the artificial intelligence company's board. "We appreciate the support shown by OpenAI leadership and the OpenAI board as we made this decision," the letter said. The surprise departure comes amid intensifying scrutiny from antitrust regulators of the powerful AI partnership. Microsoft has reportedly invested 13 billion in OpenAI.

Examining potential changes to consumer IoT could provide some answers. Specifically, the vast range of areas where the technology finds home and personal uses, from smart home controls through smart watches and other wearables to VR gaming--to name just a handful. The underlying technological changes sparking interest in this specific area mirror those in IoT as a whole. IoT is much more than a huge collection of "things," such as automated sensing devices and attached actuators to take limited actions. These devices, of course, play a key role.

Deep learning algorithms - typically consisting of a class of deep neural networks trained by a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method - are nowadays the key ingredients in many artificial intelligence (AI) systems and have revolutionized our ways of working and living in modern societies. For example, SGD methods are used to train powerful large language models (LLMs) such as versions of ChatGPT and Gemini, SGD methods are employed to create successful generative AI based text-to-image creation models such as Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion, but SGD methods are also used to train DNNs to approximately solve scientific models such as partial differential equation (PDE) models from physics and biology and optimal control and stopping problems from engineering. It is known that the plain vanilla standard SGD method fails to converge even in the situation of several convex optimization problems if the learning rates are bounded away from zero. However, in many practical relevant training scenarios, often not the plain vanilla standard SGD method but instead adaptive SGD methods such as the RMSprop and the Adam optimizers, in which the learning rates are modified adaptively during the training process, are employed. This naturally rises the question whether such adaptive optimizers, in which the learning rates are modified adaptively during the training process, do converge in the situation of non-vanishing learning rates. In this work we answer this question negatively by proving that adaptive SGD methods such as the popular Adam optimizer fail to converge to any possible random limit point if the learning rates are asymptotically bounded away from zero. In our proof of this non-convergence result we establish suitable pathwise a priori bounds for a class of accelerated and adaptive SGD methods, which are also of independent interest.

Traffic flow estimation (TFE) is crucial for intelligent transportation systems. Traditional TFE methods rely on extensive road sensor networks and typically incur significant costs. Sparse mobile crowdsensing enables a cost-effective alternative by utilizing sparsely distributed probe vehicle data (PVD) provided by connected vehicles. However, as pointed out by the central limit theorem, the sparsification of PVD leads to the degradation of TFE accuracy. In response, this paper introduces a novel and cost-effective TFE framework that leverages sparse PVD and improves accuracy by applying the spatial-temporal generative artificial intelligence (GAI) framework. Within this framework, the conditional encoder mines spatial-temporal correlations in the initial TFE results derived from averaging vehicle speeds of each region, and the generative decoder generates high-quality and accurate TFE outputs. Additionally, the design of the spatial-temporal neural network is discussed, which is the backbone of the conditional encoder for effectively capturing spatial-temporal correlations. The effectiveness of the proposed TFE approach is demonstrated through evaluations based on real-world connected vehicle data. The experimental results affirm the feasibility of our sparse PVD-based TFE framework and highlight the significant role of the spatial-temporal GAI framework in enhancing the accuracy of TFE.

Enterprise chatbots, powered by generative AI, are emerging as key applications to enhance employee productivity. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Large Language Models (LLMs), and orchestration frameworks like Langchain and Llamaindex are crucial for building these chatbots. However, creating effective enterprise chatbots is challenging and requires meticulous RAG pipeline engineering. This includes fine-tuning embeddings and LLMs, extracting documents from vector databases, rephrasing queries, reranking results, designing prompts, honoring document access controls, providing concise responses, including references, safeguarding personal information, and building orchestration agents. We present a framework for building RAG-based chatbots based on our experience with three NVIDIA chatbots: for IT/HR benefits, financial earnings, and general content. Our contributions are three-fold: introducing the FACTS framework (Freshness, Architectures, Cost, Testing, Security), presenting fifteen RAG pipeline control points, and providing empirical results on accuracy-latency tradeoffs between large and small LLMs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper of its kind that provides a holistic view of the factors as well as solutions for building secure enterprise-grade chatbots."

Automated 3D city generation, focusing on road networks and building layouts, is in high demand for applications in urban design, multimedia games and autonomous driving simulations. The surge of generative AI facilitates designing city layouts based on deep learning models. However, the lack of high-quality datasets and benchmarks hinders the progress of these data-driven methods in generating road networks and building layouts. Furthermore, few studies consider urban characteristics, which generally take graphics as analysis objects and are crucial for practical applications, to control the generative process. To alleviate these problems, we introduce a multimodal dataset with accompanying evaluation metrics for controllable generation of Road networks and Building layouts (RoBus), which is the first and largest open-source dataset in city generation so far. RoBus dataset is formatted as images, graphics and texts, with $72,400$ paired samples that cover around $80,000km^2$ globally. We analyze the RoBus dataset statistically and validate the effectiveness against existing road networks and building layouts generation methods. Additionally, we design new baselines that incorporate urban characteristics, such as road orientation and building density, in the process of generating road networks and building layouts using the RoBus dataset, enhancing the practicality of automated urban design. The RoBus dataset and related codes are published at https://github.com/tourlics/RoBus_Dataset.

In light of prominent discourse around the negative implications of generative AI, an emerging area of research is investigating the current and estimated impacts of AI-generated propaganda on African citizens participating in elections. Throughout Africa, there have already been suspected cases of AI-generated propaganda influencing electoral outcomes or precipitating coups in countries like Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Gabon, underscoring the need for comprehensive research in this domain. This paper aims to highlight the risks associated with the spread of generative AI-driven disinformation within Africa while concurrently examining the roles of government, civil society, academia, and the general public in the responsible development, practical use, and robust governance of AI. To understand how African governments might effectively counteract the impact of AI-generated propaganda, this paper presents case studies illustrating the current usage of generative AI for election-related propaganda in Africa. Subsequently, this paper discusses efforts by fact-checking organisations to mitigate the negative impacts of disinformation, explores the potential for new initiatives to actively engage citizens in literacy efforts to combat disinformation spread, and advocates for increased governmental regulatory measures. Overall, this research seeks to increase comprehension of the potential ramifications of AI-generated propaganda on democratic processes within Africa and propose actionable strategies for stakeholders to address these multifaceted challenges.

Amid the rising intersection of generative AI and human artistic processes, this study probes the critical yet less-explored terrain of alignment in human-centric automatic song composition. We propose a novel task of Colloquial Description-to-Song Generation, which focuses on aligning the generated content with colloquial human expressions. This task is aimed at bridging the gap between colloquial language understanding and auditory expression within an AI model, with the ultimate goal of creating songs that accurately satisfy human auditory expectations and structurally align with musical norms. Current datasets are limited due to their narrow descriptive scope, semantic gaps and inaccuracies. To overcome data scarcity in this domain, we present the Caichong Music Dataset (CaiMD). CaiMD is manually annotated by both professional musicians and amateurs, offering diverse perspectives and a comprehensive understanding of colloquial descriptions. Unlike existing datasets pre-set with expert annotations or auto-generated ones with inherent biases, CaiMD caters more sufficiently to our purpose of aligning AI-generated music with widespread user-desired results. Moreover, we propose an innovative single-stage framework called MuDiT/MuSiT for enabling effective human-machine alignment in song creation. This framework not only achieves cross-modal comprehension between colloquial language and auditory music perceptions but also ensures generated songs align with user-desired results. MuDiT/MuSiT employs one DiT/SiT model for end-to-end generation of musical components like melody, harmony, rhythm, vocals, and instrumentation. The approach ensures harmonious sonic cohesiveness amongst all generated musical components, facilitating better resonance with human auditory expectations.

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in image generation, with studies suggesting that they can generalize by composing latent factors learned from the training data. In this work, we go further and study DDPMs trained on strictly separate subsets of the data distribution with large gaps on the support of the latent factors. We show that such a model can effectively generate images in the unexplored, intermediate regions of the distribution. For instance, when trained on clearly smiling and non-smiling faces, we demonstrate a sampling procedure which can generate slightly smiling faces without reference images (zero-shot interpolation). We replicate these findings for other attributes as well as other datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/jdeschena/ddpm-zero-shot-interpolation.

The development of wireless sensing technologies, using signals such as Wi-Fi, infrared, and RF to gather environmental data, has significantly advanced within Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Among these, Radio Frequency (RF) sensing stands out for its cost-effective and non-intrusive monitoring of human activities and environmental changes. However, traditional RF sensing methods face significant challenges, including noise, interference, incomplete data, and high deployment costs, which limit their effectiveness and scalability. This paper investigates the potential of Generative AI (GenAI) to overcome these limitations within the IoT ecosystem. We provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art GenAI techniques, focusing on their application to RF sensing problems. By generating high-quality synthetic data, enhancing signal quality, and integrating multi-modal data, GenAI offers robust solutions for RF environment reconstruction, localization, and imaging. Additionally, GenAI's ability to generalize enables IoT devices to adapt to new environments and unseen tasks, improving their efficiency and performance. The main contributions of this article include a detailed analysis of the challenges in RF sensing, the presentation of innovative GenAI-based solutions, and the proposal of a unified framework for diverse RF sensing tasks. Through case studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating GenAI models, leading to advanced, scalable, and intelligent IoT systems.