Generative AI
XFlowMP: Task-Conditioned Motion Fields for Generative Robot Planning with Schrodinger Bridges
Generative robotic motion planning requires not only the synthesis of smooth and collision-free trajectories but also feasibility across diverse tasks and dynamic constraints. Prior planning methods, both traditional and generative, often struggle to incorporate high-level semantics with low-level constraints, especially the nexus between task configurations and motion controllability. In this work, we present XFlowMP, a task-conditioned generative motion planner that models robot trajectory evolution as entropic flows bridging stochastic noises and expert demonstrations via Schrodinger bridges given the inquiry task configuration. Specifically, our method leverages Schrodinger bridges as a conditional flow matching coupled with a score function to learn motion fields with high-order dynamics while encoding start-goal configurations, enabling the generation of collision-free and dynamically-feasible motions. Through evaluations, XFlowMP achieves up to 53.79% lower maximum mean discrepancy, 36.36% smoother motions, and 39.88% lower energy consumption while comparing to the next-best baseline on the RobotPointMass benchmark, and also reducing short-horizon planning time by 11.72%. On long-horizon motions in the LASA Handwriting dataset, our method maintains the trajectories with 1.26% lower maximum mean discrepancy, 3.96% smoother, and 31.97% lower energy. We further demonstrate the practicality of our method on the Kinova Gen3 manipulator, executing planning motions and confirming its robustness in real-world settings.
How to glimpse a pre-AI internet
Slop Evader isn't meant as a solution, but it gives a temporary reprieve. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A sizable portion of the internet has devolved into an AI-contaminated wasteland . While an easy solution remains elusive, a browser extension called Slop Evader offers a glimpse at what the internet to be only a few short years ago. While always prone to innumerable hazards, the online ecosystem is degrading largely due to the misuse of generative artificial intelligence content .
The State of AI: Welcome to the economic singularity
Bonus: If you're an subscriber, you can join David and Richard, alongside's editor in chief, Mat Honan, for an exclusive conversation live on Tuesday, December 9 at 1pm ET about this topic. Sign up to be a part here . Any far-reaching new technology is always uneven in its adoption, but few have been more uneven than generative AI. That makes it hard to assess its likely impact on individual businesses, let alone on productivity across the economy as a whole. At one extreme, AI coding assistants have revolutionized the work of software developers. Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that half of Meta's code would be written by AI within a year.
James Cameron says AI actors are 'horrifying to me'
'Generative AI can't create something new' James Cameron. 'Generative AI can't create something new' James Cameron. James Cameron says AI actors are'horrifying to me' Avatar director, known for his advocacy of new technology, told interviewer generative AI performance puts'all human experience into a blender' Avatar director James Cameron has called AI actors "horrifying" and said what generative AI technology creates is "an average". Cameron was speaking to CBS on Sunday Morning in the run-up to the release of the third Avatar film, subtitled Fire and Ash, and was asked about the pioneering technology he used in his film-making. After praising motion-capture performance as "a celebration of the actor-director moment", Cameron expressed his disdain for artificial intelligence.
Proactive Defense: Compound AI for Detecting Persuasion Attacks and Measuring Inoculation Effectiveness
Volkova, Svitlana, Dupree, Will, Kao, Hsien-Te, Bautista, Peter, Ganberg, Gabe, Beaubien, Jeff, Cassani, Laura
This paper introduces BRIES, a novel compound AI architecture designed to detect and measure the effectiveness of persuasion attacks across information environments. We present a system with specialized agents: a Twister that generates adversarial content employing targeted persuasion tactics, a Detector that identifies attack types with configurable parameters, a Defender that creates resilient content through content inoculation, and an Assessor that employs causal inference to evaluate inoculation effectiveness. Experimenting with the SemEval 2023 Task 3 taxonomy across the synthetic persuasion dataset, we demonstrate significant variations in detection performance across language agents. Our comparative analysis reveals significant performance disparities with GPT-4 achieving superior detection accuracy on complex persuasion techniques, while open-source models like Llama3 and Mistral demonstrated notable weaknesses in identifying subtle rhetorical, suggesting that different architectures encode and process persuasive language patterns in fundamentally different ways. We show that prompt engineering dramatically affects detection efficacy, with temperature settings and confidence scoring producing model-specific variations; Gemma and GPT-4 perform optimally at lower temperatures while Llama3 and Mistral show improved capabilities at higher temperatures. Our causal analysis provides novel insights into socio-emotional-cognitive signatures of persuasion attacks, revealing that different attack types target specific cognitive dimensions. This research advances generative AI safety and cognitive security by quantifying LLM-specific vulnerabilities to persuasion attacks and delivers a framework for enhancing human cognitive resilience through structured interventions before exposure to harmful content.
ORION: Teaching Language Models to Reason Efficiently in the Language of Thought
Tanmay, Kumar, Aggarwal, Kriti, Liang, Paul Pu, Mukherjee, Subhabrata
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in mathematics, code generation, and task planning. Inspired by the Language of Thought Hypothesis --which posits that human reasoning operates over a symbolic, compositional mental language called Mentalese--we introduce a cognitively motivated framework that trains models to reason in a similar compact style. Mentalese encodes abstract reasoning as ultra-compressed, structured tokens, enabling models to solve complex problems with far fewer steps. When applied to Mentalese-aligned models, SLPO achieves much larger compression rates by enabling compressed reasoning that preserves the benefits of detailed thinking without the computational overhead, allowing us to present the best-performing models at each compression level along the performance-efficiency Pareto frontier. Across mathematical benchmarks -- including AIME 2024 & 2025, Minerva-Math, OlympiadBench, Math500, and AMC -- our ORION models generate reasoning traces with 4-16 fewer tokens, achieve up to 5 lower inference latency, and reduce training costs by 7-9 relative to the base DeepSeek R1 Distilled model, while maintaining 90-98% of the baseline accuracy. ORION models also surpass Claude and ChatGPT -4o by up to 5% in accuracy while maintaining 2 compression. Our findings demonstrate Mentalese-style compressed reasoning offers a breakthrough toward human-like cognitive efficiency, opening new possibilities for real-time, cost-effective reasoning without sacrificing accuracy. The dotted curve indicates the Pareto frontier, which illustrates the trade-off between higher compression rates and loss in accuracy. Our proposed method, combining Mentalese alignment with SLPO, consistently lies on this frontier, identifying an optimal operating point that achieves a balance between accuracy and efficiency. Work done during internship at Hippocratic AI. Recent advances such as OpenAI o1 (OpenAI et al., 2024b) and DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025) have reshaped how we think about language model reasoning. By letting models "think before they answer," these systems dramatically improved credibility and performance--achievements that were once thought impossible for LLMs (Wu et al., 2024). Explicit reasoning has thus emerged as a central focus of LLM research (Xu et al., 2025).
Advancing Marine Bioacoustics with Deep Generative Models: A Hybrid Augmentation Strategy for Southern Resident Killer Whale Detection
Padovese, Bruno, Frazao, Fabio, Dowd, Michael, Joy, Ruth
Automated detection and classification of marine mammals vocalizations is critical for conservation and management efforts but is hindered by limited annotated datasets and the acoustic complexity of real-world marine environments. Data augmentation has proven to be an effective strategy to address this limitation by increasing dataset diversity and improving model generalization without requiring additional field data. However, most augmentation techniques used to date rely on effective but relatively simple transformations, leaving open the question of whether deep generative models can provide additional benefits. In this study, we evaluate the potential of deep generative for data augmentation in marine mammal call detection including: Variational Autoencoders, Generative Adversarial Networks, and Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models. Using Southern Resident Killer Whale (Orcinus orca) vocalizations from two long-term hydrophone deployments in the Salish Sea, we compare these approaches against traditional augmentation methods such as time-shifting and vocalization masking. While all generative approaches improved classification performance relative to the baseline, diffusion-based augmentation yielded the highest recall (0.87) and overall F1-score (0.75). A hybrid strategy combining generative-based synthesis with traditional methods achieved the best overall performance with an F1-score of 0.81. We hope this study encourages further exploration of deep generative models as complementary augmentation strategies to advance acoustic monitoring of threatened marine mammal populations.
Reducing research bureaucracy in UK higher education: Can generative AI assist with the internal evaluation of quality?
Fletcher, Gordon, Khan, Saomai Vu, Fletcher, Aldus Greenhill
This paper examines the potential for generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to assist with internal review processes for research quality evaluations in UK higher education and particularly in preparation for the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Using the lens of function substitution in the Viable Systems Model, we present an experimental methodology using ChatGPT to score and rank business and management papers from REF 2021 submissions, "reverse engineering" the assessment by comparing AI-generated scores with known institutional results. Through rigourous testing of 822 papers across 11 institutions, we established scoring boundaries that aligned with reported REF outcomes: 49% between 1* and 2*, 59% between 2* and 3*, and 69% between 3* and 4*. The results demonstrate that AI can provide consistent evaluations that help identify borderline evaluation cases requiring additional human scrutiny while reducing the substantial resource burden of traditional internal review processes. We argue for application through a nuanced hybrid approach that maintains academic integrity while addressing the multi-million pound costs associated with research evaluation bureaucracy. While acknowledging these limitations including potential AI biases, the research presents a promising framework for more efficient, consistent evaluations that could transform current approaches to research assessment.
Addressing Stereotypes in Large Language Models: A Critical Examination and Mitigation
Large Language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have gained popularity in recent years with the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP), with use cases spanning many disciplines and daily lives as well. LLMs inherit explicit and implicit biases from the datasets they were trained on; these biases can include social, ethical, cultural, religious, and other prejudices and stereotypes. It is important to comprehensively examine such shortcomings by identifying the existence and extent of such biases, recognizing the origin, and attempting to mitigate such biased outputs to ensure fair outputs to reduce harmful stereotypes and misinformation. This study inspects and highlights the need to address biases in LLMs amid growing generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). We utilize bias-specific benchmarks such StereoSet and CrowSPairs to evaluate the existence of various biases in many different generative models such as BERT, GPT 3.5, and ADA. To detect both explicit and implicit biases, we adopt a three-pronged approach for thorough and inclusive analysis. Results indicate fine-tuned models struggle with gender biases but excel at identifying and avoiding racial biases. Our findings also illustrated that despite some cases of success, LLMs often over-rely on keywords in prompts and its outputs. This demonstrates the incapability of LLMs to attempt to truly understand the accuracy and authenticity of its outputs. Finally, in an attempt to bolster model performance, we applied an enhancement learning strategy involving fine-tuning, models using different prompting techniques, and data augmentation of the bias benchmarks. We found fine-tuned models to exhibit promising adaptability during cross-dataset testing and significantly enhanced performance on implicit bias benchmarks, with performance gains of up to 20%.
Human Experts' Evaluation of Generative AI for Contextualizing STEAM Education in the Global South
Nyaaba, Matthew, Nabang, Macharious, Kyeremeh, Patrick, Nantomah, Ibrahim, Owusu-Fordjour, Collins, Ako, Martin, Akanzire, Bismark Nyaaba, Nantomah, Kassim Korah, Issaka, Cecilia, Zhai, Xiaoming
STEAM education in many parts of the Global South remains abstract and weakly connected to learners sociocultural realities. This study examines how human experts evaluate the capacity of Generative AI (GenAI) to contextualize STEAM instruction in these settings. Using a convergent mixed-methods design grounded in human-centered and culturally responsive pedagogy, four STEAM education experts reviewed standardized Ghana NaCCA lesson plans and GenAI-generated lessons created with a customized Culturally Responsive Lesson Planner (CRLP). Quantitative data were collected with a validated 25-item Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Rubric assessing bias awareness, cultural representation, contextual relevance, linguistic responsiveness, and teacher agency. Qualitative reflections provided additional insight into the pedagogical and cultural dynamics of each lesson. Findings show that GenAI, especially through the CRLP, improved connections between abstract standards and learners lived experiences. Teacher Agency was the strongest domain, while Cultural Representation was the weakest. CRLP-generated lessons were rated as more culturally grounded and pedagogically engaging. However, GenAI struggled to represent Ghana's cultural diversity, often producing surface-level references, especially in Mathematics and Computing. Experts stressed the need for teacher mediation, community input, and culturally informed refinement of AI outputs. Future work should involve classroom trials, broader expert participation, and fine-tuning with Indigenous corpora.