The integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in healthcare is impeded by significant security challenges unaddressed by traditional frameworks, precisely the data-in-use gap where sensitive patient data and proprietary AI models are exposed during active processing. To address this, the paper proposes the Confidential Zero-Trust Framework (CZF), a novel security paradigm that synergistically combines Zero-Trust Architecture for granular access control with the hardware-enforced data isolation of Confidential Computing. We detailed a multi-tiered architectural blueprint for implementing the CZF on Google Cloud and analyzed its efficacy against real-world threats. The CZF provides a defense-in-depth architecture where data remains encrypted while in-use within a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). The framework's use of remote attestation offers cryptographic proof of workload integrity, transforming compliance from a procedural exercise into a verifiable technical fact and enabling secure, multi-party collaborations previously blocked by security and intellectual property concerns. By closing the data-in-use gap and enforcing Zero-Trust principles, the CZF provides a robust and verifiable framework that establishes the necessary foundation of trust to enable the responsible adoption of transformative AI technologies in healthcare.

Abstract--The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) tools like Chat-GPT has created new opportunities and challenges for computing education. Existing research has primarily focused on GenAI's ability to complete educational tasks and its impact on student performance, often overlooking its effects on knowledge gains. In this study, we investigate how GenAI assistance compares to conventional online resources in supporting knowledge gains across different proficiency levels. We conducted a controlled user experiment with 24 undergraduate students of two different levels of programming experience (beginner, intermediate) to examine how students interact with ChatGPT while solving programming tasks. We analyzed task performance, conceptual understanding, and interaction behaviors. Our findings reveal that generating complete solutions with GenAI significantly improves task performance, especially for beginners, but does not consistently result in knowledge gains. Importantly, usage strategies differ by experience: beginners tend to rely heavily on GenAI toward task completion often without knowledge gain in the process, while intermediates adopt more selective approaches. We find that both over-reliance and minimal use result in weaker knowledge gains overall. Based on our results, we call on students and educators to adopt GenAI as a learning rather than a problem solving tool. Our study highlights the urgent need for guidance when integrating GenAI into programming education to foster deeper understanding. The rapid development of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has led to its widespread adoption across various domains to boost productivity and streamline workflows. Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Codex, Google Gemini, and GitHub Copilot, have been integrated into domains including software engineering [1], [2], healthcare [3], education [4], creative writing [5], [6], and digital music [7], offering capabilities such as code generation, question answering, and image generation. These authors contributed equally to this work. Some studies evaluated GenAI's performance on programming tasks [8], user interface design education [9], and computer vision coursework [10]. Others focused on assessing the accuracy and usability of GenAIgenerated responses [11], [12].

The proliferation of generative AI has led to hyper-realistic synthetic videos, escalating misuse risks and outstripping binary real/fake detectors. We introduce SAGA (Source Attribution of Generative AI videos), the first comprehensive framework to address the urgent need for AI-generated video source attribution at a large scale. Unlike traditional detection, SAGA identifies the specific generative model used. It uniquely provides multi-granular attribution across five levels: authenticity, generation task (e.g., T2V/I2V), model version, development team, and the precise generator, offering far richer forensic insights. Our novel video transformer architecture, leveraging features from a robust vision foundation model, effectively captures spatio-temporal artifacts. Critically, we introduce a data-efficient pretrain-and-attribute strategy, enabling SAGA to achieve state-of-the-art attribution using only 0.5\% of source-labeled data per class, matching fully supervised performance. Furthermore, we propose Temporal Attention Signatures (T-Sigs), a novel interpretability method that visualizes learned temporal differences, offering the first explanation for why different video generators are distinguishable. Extensive experiments on public datasets, including cross-domain scenarios, demonstrate that SAGA sets a new benchmark for synthetic video provenance, providing crucial, interpretable insights for forensic and regulatory applications.

Modeling the dynamics of financial Limit Order Books (LOB) at the message level is challenging due to irregular event timing, rapid regime shifts, and the reactions of high-frequency traders to visible order flow. Previous LOB models require cumbersome data representations and lack adaptability outside their original tasks, leading us to introduce LOBERT, a general-purpose encoder-only foundation model for LOB data suitable for downstream fine-tuning. LOBERT adapts the original BERT architecture for LOB data by using a novel tokenization scheme that treats complete multi-dimensional messages as single tokens while retaining continuous representations of price, volume, and time. With these methods, LOBERT achieves leading performance in tasks such as predicting mid-price movements and next messages, while reducing the required context length compared to previous methods.

Robotic manipulation and navigation are fundamental capabilities of embodied intelligence, enabling effective robot interactions with the physical world. Achieving these capabilities requires a cohesive understanding of the environment, including object recognition to localize target objects, object affordances to identify potential interaction areas and spatial affordances to discern optimal areas for both object placement and robot movement. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at high-level task planning and scene understanding, they often struggle to infer actionable positions for physical interaction, such as functional grasping points and permissible placement regions. This limitation stems from the lack of fine-grained annotations for object and spatial affordances in their training datasets. To tackle this challenge, we introduce RoboAfford++, a generative AI-enhanced dataset for multimodal affordance learning for both robotic manipulation and navigation. Our dataset comprises 869,987 images paired with 2.0 million question answering (QA) annotations, covering three critical tasks: object affordance recognition to identify target objects based on attributes and spatial relationships, object affordance prediction to pinpoint functional parts for manipulation, and spatial affordance localization to identify free space for object placement and robot navigation. Complementing this dataset, we propose RoboAfford-Eval, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing affordance-aware prediction in real-world scenarios, featuring 338 meticulously annotated samples across the same three tasks. Extensive experimental results reveal the deficiencies of existing VLMs in affordance learning, while fine-tuning on the RoboAfford++ dataset significantly enhances their ability to reason about object and spatial affordances, validating the dataset's effectiveness.

Recent advances in text-to-image generation have produced strong single-shot models, yet no individual system reliably executes the long, compositional prompts typical of creative workflows. We introduce Image-POSER, a reflective reinforcement learning framework that (i) orchestrates a diverse registry of pretrained text-to-image and image-to-image experts, (ii) handles long-form prompts end-to-end through dynamic task decomposition, and (iii) supervises alignment at each step via structured feedback from a vision-language model critic. By casting image synthesis and editing as a Markov Decision Process, we learn non-trivial expert pipelines that adaptively combine strengths across models. Experiments show that Image-POSER outperforms baselines, including frontier models, across industry-standard and custom benchmarks in alignment, fidelity, and aesthetics, and is consistently preferred in human evaluations. These results highlight that reinforcement learning can endow AI systems with the capacity to autonomously decompose, reorder, and combine visual models, moving towards general-purpose visual assistants.

Research on how the popularization of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools impacts learning environments has led to hesitancy among educators to teach these tools in classrooms, creating two observed disconnects. Generative AI competency is increasingly valued in industry but not in higher education, and students are experimenting with generative AI without formal guidance. The authors argue students across fields must be taught to responsibly and expertly harness the potential of AI tools to ensure job market readiness and positive outcomes. Computer Science trajectories are particularly impacted, and while consistently top ranked U.S. Computer Science departments teach the mechanisms and frameworks underlying AI, few appear to offer courses on applications for existing generative AI tools. A course was developed at a private research university to teach undergraduate and graduate Computer Science students applications for generative AI tools in software development. Two mixed method surveys indicated students overwhelmingly found the course valuable and effective. Co-authored by the instructor and one of the graduate students, this paper explores the context, implementation, and impact of the course through data analysis and reflections from both perspectives. It additionally offers recommendations for replication in and beyond Computer Science departments. This is the extended version of this paper to include technical appendices.

These authors contributed equally to this work. For decades, the dominance of English has created a substantial barrier in global science, disadvantaging non-native speakers. The recent rise of generative AI (GenAI) offers a potential technological response to this long-standing inequity. We provide the first large-scale evidence testing whether GenAI acts as a linguistic equalizer in global science. Drawing on 5.65 million scientific articles published from 2021 to 2024, we compare GenAI-assisted and non-assisted publications from authors in non-English-speaking countries. Using text embeddings derived from a pretrained large language model (SciBERT), we measure each publication's linguistic similarity to a benchmark of scientific writing from U.S.-based authors and track stylistic convergence over time. We find significant and growing convergence for GenAI-assisted publications after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. The effect is strongest for domestic coauthor teams from countries linguistically distant from English. These findings provide large-scale evidence that GenAI is beginning to reshape global science communication by reducing language barriers in research. The rapid rise of generative AI (GenAI) has sparked an important debate regarding its role in science--raising questions of whether it homogenizes writing and erodes authorship norms (1,2) or whether it acts as a "linguistic equalizer" that lowers barriers for non-native English speakers (3,4). This debate is especially salient because English has long dominated global science, which gives native speakers a structural advantage (5-7) by creating larger writing burdens and unique peer review bias risks for researchers from non-Anglophone countries (8-12). As a result, many of these researchers have historically spent time in the U.S. or the UK to learn how to write in English or have hired (expensive) language experts (13, 14). Against this backdrop, the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, a chatbot based on a large language model (LLM), marked a turning point. This widely accessible, low-cost, and human-like tool offers a potential means of reducing longstanding linguistic imbalances (15, 16).

Assessing the quality of group deliberation is essential for improving our understanding of deliberative processes. The Deliberative Reason Index (DRI) offers a sophisticated metric for evaluating group reasoning, but its implementation has been constrained by the complex and time-consuming process of statement generation. This thesis introduces an innovative, automated approach to DRI statement generation that leverages advanced natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) to substantially reduce the human effort involved in survey preparation. Key contributions are a systematic framework for automated DRI statement generation and a methodological innovation that significantly lowers the barrier to conducting comprehensive deliberative process assessments. In addition, the findings provide a replicable template for integrating generative artificial intelligence into social science research methodologies.

Optics is foundational to research in many areas of science and engineering, including nanophotonics, quantum information, materials science, biomedical imaging, and metrology. However, the design, assembly, and alignment of optical experiments remain predominantly manual, limiting throughput and reproducibility. Automating such experiments is challenging due to the strict, non-negotiable precision requirements and the diversity of optical configurations found in typical laboratories. Here, we introduce a platform that integrates generative artificial intelligence, computer vision, and robotics to automate free-space optical experiments. The platform translates user-defined goals into valid optical configurations, assembles them using a robotic arm, and performs micrometer-scale fine alignment using a robot-deployable tool. It then executes a range of automated measurements, including beam characterization, polarization mapping, and spectroscopy, with consistency surpassing that of human operators. This work demonstrates the first flexible, AI-driven automation platform for optics, offering a path towards remote operation, cloud labs, and high-throughput discovery in the optical sciences.