Haoyue Bai works at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Posts

Brownian Bridge Augmented Surrogate Simulation and Injection Planning for Geological CO2 Storage

Geological CO2 storage (GCS) involves injecting captured CO2 into deep sub-surface formations to support climate goals. The effective management of GCS relies on adaptive injection planning to dynamically control injection rates and well pressures to balance both storage safety and efficiency. Prior literature, including numerical optimization methods and surrogate-optimization methods, is limited by real-world GCS requirements of smooth state transitions and goal-directed planning within limited time. To address these limitations, we propose a Brownian Bridge — augmented framework for surrogate simulation and injection planning in GCS and develop two insights (i) Brownian bridge as smooth state regularizer for better surrogate simulator; (ii) Brownian bridge as goal-time-conditioned planning guidance for better injection planning. Our method has three stages: (i) learning deep Brownian bridge representations with contrastive and reconstructive losses from historical reservoir and utility trajectories, (ii) incorporating Brownian bridge-based next state interpolation for simulator regularization (iii) guiding injection planning with Brownian utility-conditioned trajectories to generate high-quality injection plans. Experimental results across multiple datasets collected from diverse GCS settings demonstrate that our framework consistently improves simulation fidelity and planning effectiveness while maintaining low computational overhead.

Where’s the Liability in the Generative Era? Recovery-based Black-Box Detection of AI-Generated Content

The recent proliferation of photorealistic images created by generative models has sparked both excitement and concern, as these images are increasingly indistinguishable from real ones to the human eye. While offering new creative and commercial possibilities, the potential for misuse, such as in misinformation and fraud, highlights the need for effective detection methods. Current detection approaches often rely on access to model weights or require extensive collections of real image datasets, limiting their scalability and practical application in real-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce a novel black-box detection framework that requires only API access, sidestepping the need for model weights or large auxiliary datasets. Our approach leverages a corrupt-and-recover strategy: by masking part of an image and assessing the model’s ability to reconstruct it, we measure the likelihood that the image was generated by the model itself. For black-box models that do not support masked-image inputs, we incorporate a cost-efficient surrogate model trained to align with the target model’s distribution, enhancing detection capability. Our framework demonstrates strong performance, outperforming baseline methods by 4.31% in mean average precision across eight diffusion model variant datasets.