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Generative AI or generative artificial intelligence refers to a type of AI that can create various types of content including text, audio, music, images, videos, and code. This is powered by large models called foundation models that are trained on massive datasets to perform out-of-the-box tasks including classification, summarization, video and audio comprehension, prediction, Q&A, and more.
Papers and Code
AI-Generated Images: What Humans and Machines See When They Look at the Same Image
May 07, 2026
The misuse of generative AI in online disinformation campaigns highlights the urgent need for transparent and explainable detection systems. In this work, we investigate how detectors for AI-generated images can be more effective in providing human-understandable explanations for their predictions. To this end, we develop a suite of detectors with various architectures and fine-tuning strategies, trained on our large-scale photorealistic fake image dataset, AIText2Image, and assess their performance on state-of-the-art text-to-image AI generators. We integrate 16 different explainable AI (XAI) methods into our detection framework, and the visual explanations are comprehensively refined and evaluated through a novel approach that prioritizes human understanding of AI-generated images, using both textual and visual responses collected from a survey of 100 participants. This framework offers insights into visual-language cues in fake image detection and into the clarity of XAI methods from a human perspective, measuring the alignment of XAI outputs with human preferences.
PersonaTeaming: Supporting Persona-Driven Red-Teaming for Generative AI
May 07, 2026Recent developments in AI safety research have called for red-teaming methods that effectively surface potential risks posed by generative AI models, with growing emphasis on how red-teamers' backgrounds and perspectives shape their strategies and the risks they uncover. While automated red-teaming approaches promise to complement human red-teaming through larger-scale exploration, existing automated approaches do not account for human identities and rarely incorporate human inputs. In this work, we explore persona-driven red-teaming to advance both automated red-teaming and human-AI collaboration. We first develop PersonaTeaming Workflow, which incorporates personas into the adversarial prompt generation process to explore a wider spectrum of adversarial strategies. Compared to RainbowPlus, a state-of-the-art automated red-teaming method, PersonaTeaming Workflow achieves higher attack success rates while maintaining prompt diversity. However, since automated personas only approximate real human perspectives, we further instantiate PersonaTeaming Workflow as PersonaTeaming Playground, a user-facing interface that enables red-teamers to author their own personas and collaborate with AI to mutate and refine prompts. In a user study with 11 industry practitioners, we found that PersonaTeaming Playground enabled diverse red-teaming strategies and outputs that practitioners perceived as useful, and that AI-generated suggestions in the PersonaTeaming Playground encouraged out-of-the-box thinking even when practitioners did not follow them strictly. Together, our work advances both automated and human-in-the-loop approaches to red-teaming, while shedding light on interaction patterns and design insights for supporting human-AI collaboration in generative AI red-teaming.
Detecting AI-Generated Videos with Spiking Neural Networks
May 07, 2026Modern AI-generated videos are photorealistic at the single-frame level, leaving inter-frame dynamics as the main remaining axis for detection. Existing detectors typically handle this temporal evidence in three ways: feeding the full frame sequence to a generic temporal backbone, reducing one dominant temporal cue to fixed video-level descriptors, or comparing temporal features to real-video statistics through a detection metric. These strategies degrade sharply under cross-generator evaluation, where artifact type and timescale vary across generators. On caption-paired benchmark, GenVidBench, we identify two signatures that prior detectors do not jointly exploit: AI-generated videos exhibit smoother frame-to-frame temporal residuals at the pixel level, and more compact trajectories in the semantic feature space, indicating a temporal smoothness gap at both levels. We further observe that, when raw video is fed into a Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), fake clips elicit firing predominantly at object and motion boundaries, unlike real clips, suggesting that the SNN responds to temporal artifacts localized at edges. These cues are sparse, asynchronous, and concentrated at moments of change, which makes SNNs a natural choice for this task: their event-driven, sparsely-activated dynamics align with the structure of the residual signal in a way that dense ANN backbones do not. Building on this observation, we propose MAST, a detector that processes multi-channel temporal residuals with a spike-driven temporal branch alongside a frozen semantic encoder for cross-generator generalization. On the GenVideo benchmark, MAST achieves 93.14\% mean accuracy across 10 unseen generators under strict cross-generator evaluation, matching or surpassing the strongest ANN-based detectors and demonstrating the practical applicability of SNNs to AI-generated video detection.
Leveraging Image Generators to Address Training Data Scarcity: The Gen4Regen Dataset for Forest Regeneration Mapping
May 07, 2026Sustainable forest management relies on precise species composition mapping, yet traditional ground surveys are labour-intensive and geographically constrained. While Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer scalable data collection, the transition to deep learning-based interpretation is bottlenecked by the severe scarcity of expert-annotated imagery, particularly in complex, visually heterogeneous regeneration zones. This paper addresses the dual challenges of data scarcity and extreme class imbalance in the semantic segmentation of fine-grained forest regeneration species by providing a scalable framework that reduces reliance on manual photo-interpretation for high-resolution, millimetre-level aerial imagery. Importantly, we leverage the large-scale vision-language Nano Banana Pro model to simultaneously generate high-fidelity images and their corresponding pixel-aligned semantic masks from prompts. We introduce WilDReF-Q-V2, an expansion of a natural forest dataset with 13 977 new unlabelled and 50 labelled real images, as well as the Gen4Regen dataset, featuring 2101 pairs of synthetic images and semantic masks. Our methodology integrates real-world data with AI-generated images, highlighting that AI-generated data is highly complementary to real-world data, with unified training yielding an F1 score improvement of over 15 %pt compared to purely supervised baselines. Furthermore, we demonstrate that even small quantities of prompt-generated data significantly improve performance for underrepresented species, some of which saw per-species F1 score gains of up to 30 %pt. We conclude that vision-language models can serve as agile data generators, effectively bootstrapping perception tasks for niche AI domains where expert labels are scarce or unavailable. Our datasets, source code, and models will be available at https://norlab-ulaval.github.io/gen4regen.
More Aligned, Less Diverse? Analyzing the Grammar and Lexicon of Two Generations of LLMs
May 07, 2026This study contributes to a growing line of research in comparing LLM-generated texts with human-authored text, in this case, English news text. We focus in particular on the evaluation of syntactic properties through formal grammar frameworks. Our analysis compares two generations of LLMs in the context of two human-authored English news datasets from two different years. Employing the Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) formalism, we investigate the distributions of syntactic structures and lexical types of AI-generated texts and contrast them with the corresponding distributions in the human-authored New York Times (NYT) articles. We use diversity metrics from ecology and information theory to quantify variation in grammatical constructions and lexical types. We show that English news text has changed little in the given time frame, while newer LLMs display reduced syntactic and, especially, lexical diversity compared to older, non-instruction-tuned models. These findings point to future work in studying effects of instruction tuning, which, while enhancing coherence and adherence to prompts, may narrow the expressive range of model output.
Automated alignment is harder than you think
May 07, 2026A leading proposal for aligning artificial superintelligence (ASI) is to use AI agents to automate an increasing fraction of alignment research as capabilities improve. We argue that, even when research agents are not scheming to deliberately sabotage alignment work, this plan could produce compelling but catastrophically misleading safety assessments resulting in the unintentional deployment of misaligned AI. This could happen because alignment research involves many hard-to-supervise fuzzy tasks (tasks without clear evaluation criteria, for which human judgement is systematically flawed). Consequently, research outputs will contain systematic, undetected errors, and even correct outputs could be incorrectly aggregated into overconfident safety assessments. This problem is likely to be worse for automated alignment research than for human-generated alignment research for several reasons: 1) optimisation pressure means agent-generated mistakes are concentrated among those that human reviewers are least likely to catch; 2) agents are likely to produce errors that do not resemble human mistakes; 3) AI-generated alignment solutions may involve arguments humans cannot evaluate; and 4) shared weights, data and training processes may make AI outputs more correlated than human equivalents. Therefore, agents must be trained to reliably perform hard-to-supervise fuzzy tasks. Generalisation and scalable oversight are the leading candidates for achieving this but both face novel challenges in the context of automated alignment.
Pathways to AGI
May 07, 2026Our focus are five related questions that stem from a critical software studies perspective. Underpinning this view is the acknowledged need to avoid assumptions regarding the inevitability of the current situation relating to AI. What we need to see is the closeness of the linkage between current commercial AI development and our prevailing social, political and economic circumstances. This does mean that the perspectives presented here are done so critically and conditionally. Most importantly, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is seen as being problematic both conceptually and definitionally. This conditioning of any view regarding AGI does lead the discussion in specific directions and to certain conclusions regarding the future. However, adopting this perspective enables the work to offer some final recommendations. We set out to ask the following questions, 1. What are the critical pathways that produced the current dominant generative AI tools (capabilities, product forms, adoption patterns)? 2. Which decision points acted as leverage nodes (small changes that had large downstream effects), and which dead ends reveal alternative possibilities that did not become dominant? 3. How do pathways differ across three foundational-model trajectories such as the frontier proprietary models, open-weight models or specific domain and sovereign models? 4. Which alternative projects branched from key leverage nodes, what is their current state, and why did some succeed, stall, fail or become absorbed? 5. Based on this analysis, what socio-technical development programmes could plausibly move toward AGI-adjacent capability while meeting requirements for transparency, moderation, wellbeing and sustainable business models?
From Agent Loops to Deterministic Graphs: Execution Lineage for Reproducible AI-Native Work
May 07, 2026Large language model systems are increasingly deployed as agentic workflows that interleave reasoning, tool use, memory, and iterative refinement. These systems are effective at producing answers, but they often rely on implicit conversational state, making it difficult to preserve stable work products, isolate irrelevant updates, or propagate changes through intermediate artifacts. We introduce execution lineage: an execution model in which AI-native work is represented as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of artifact-producing computations with explicit dependencies, stable intermediate boundaries, and identity-based replay. The goal is not to make the model a better one-shot writer, but to make evolving AI-generated work maintainable under change. We compare execution-lineage replay against loop-centric update baselines on two controlled policy-memo update tasks. In an unrelated-branch update, DAG replay preserved the final memo exactly in all runs, with zero churn and zero unrelated-branch contamination, while loop baselines regenerated the memo and frequently imported unrelated context. In an intermediate-artifact edit, all systems reflected the new constraint in the final memo, but only DAG replay achieved perfect upstream preservation, downstream propagation, unaffected-artifact preservation, and cross-artifact consistency. These results show that final answer quality and maintained-state quality are distinct. Strong loop baselines can remain competitive at producing polished final outputs when the task is a bounded synthesis/update problem and all current sources fit in context, but immediate task success can mask partial state inconsistency that may compound over future revisions. Execution lineage provides stronger guarantees about what should change, what should remain stable, and how work evolves across revisions.
Automated Clinical Report Generation for Remote Cognitive Remediation: Comparing Knowledge-Engineered Templates and LLMs in Low-Resource Settings
May 07, 2026The growing demand for cognitive remediation therapy, combined with limited speech therapist availability, has accelerated the adoption of remote rehabilitation tools. These systems generate large volumes of interaction data that are difficult for clinicians to review efficiently. This paper investigates automated clinical report generation for avatar-guided, home-based cognitive remediation sessions in a low-resource setting with no reference reports. We present and compare two approaches: (1) a rule-based template system encoding speech therapy domain knowledge as explicit decision rules and validated templates, ensuring clinical reliability and traceability; and (2) a zero-shot LLM-based approach (GPT-4) aimed at more fluent and concise output. Both systems use identical pre-extracted, expert-validated structured variables, enabling a controlled factual comparison. Outputs were evaluated by eight speech therapists and final-year students using a nine-criterion questionnaire. Results reveal a clear trade-off between clinical reliability and linguistic quality. The template-based system scored higher on fluidity, coherence, and results presentation, while GPT-4 produced more concise output. Directional differences are consistent across evaluation dimensions, though no comparison reached statistical significance after correction, reflecting the scale constraints of expert clinical evaluation. Based on evaluator feedback, we derive eight design recommendations for clinical reporting systems in remote rehabilitation settings. More broadly, this work contributes a replicable methodology combining expert elicitation, taxonomy-driven generation, and multi-dimensional human evaluation for clinical NLG in low-resource settings, and illustrates how controlled comparisons can inform the responsible adoption of generative AI in healthcare.
Prober.ai: Gated Inquiry-Based Feedback via LLM-Constrained Personas for Argumentative Writing Development
May 07, 2026The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) in educational settings has paradoxically undermined the cognitive processes they purport to support. Students increasingly outsource critical thinking to AI assistants that generate polished text on demand, resulting in measurable cognitive debt and diminished argumentative reasoning skills. We present Prober.ai, a web-based writing environment that inverts the conventional AI-tutoring paradigm: rather than generating or rewriting student text, the system constrains an LLM (Gemini 3 Flash Preview) through persona-specific system prompts and structured JSON output schemas to produce only targeted, inquiry-based questions about argumentative weaknesses. A two-phase interaction architecture -- Challenge and Unlock -- implements a pedagogical friction mechanism whereby revision suggestions are gated behind mandatory student reflection. The system's design is grounded in Toulmin's argumentation theory, research on peer feedforward questioning mechanisms, and evidence on AI-supported feedback in writing instruction. A functional prototype was developed in 36 hours during the NY EdTech Hackathon (March 2026), where it was awarded second place. We describe the system architecture, the prompt engineering methodology for constraining LLM output to pedagogically aligned JSON schemas, and discuss implications for scalable, cognition-preserving AI integration in writing education.