Beyond Starry Night: Shortcut-Aware Control-State Planning for Artist-Grounded Text to Image Generation

Artist-grounded image generation requires more than appending an artist name to a prompt. Image models often respond to artist names through canonical shortcuts, such as recurring motifs, generic palettes, or overrepresented period signatures, rather than preserving the user's intended scene. We introduce Atelier, a shortcut-aware control-state planning framework for artist-grounded image generation. Atelier translates underspecified artistic intent into an explicit control state that separates scene anchors, preserve/transform decisions, style-regime hypotheses, role-bound artist evidence, and shortcut-avoidance constraints. It grounds this state using artist-level knowledge and local patch references, compiles backend-aware generation plans, and iteratively refines candidates through global and local authenticity feedback. We further introduce ArtIntentBench, a benchmark covering Van Gogh and Qi Baishi across artwork re-rendering, period/style-controlled generation, historically unseen subjects, shortcut auditing, and human preference evaluation. Across open-weight and closed-source generators, Atelier improves artist-level style fidelity, preserves source structure more faithfully, and substantially reduces shortcut substitution compared with prompt-engineered, retrieval-augmented, and general-purpose agent baselines. These results suggest that artist-grounded generation is bottlenecked not only by image synthesis, but by the upstream inference of explicit, evidence-grounded artistic controls.

"Crash Test Dummies" for AI-Enabled Clinical Assessment: Validating Virtual Patient Scenarios with Virtual Learners

Background: In medical and health professions education (HPE), AI is increasingly used to assess clinical competencies, including via virtual standardized patients. However, most evaluations rely on AI-human interrater reliability and lack a measurement framework for how cases, learners, and raters jointly shape scores. This leaves robustness uncertain and can expose learners to misguidance from unvalidated systems. We address this by using AI "simulated learners" to stress-test and psychometrically characterize assessment pipelines before human use. Objective: Develop an open-source AI virtual patient platform and measurement model for robust competency evaluation across cases and rating conditions. Methods: We built a platform with virtual patients, virtual learners with tunable ACGME-aligned competency profiles, and multiple independent AI raters scoring encounters with structured Key-Features items. Transcripts were analyzed with a Bayesian HRM-SDT model that treats ratings as decisions under uncertainty and separates learner ability, case performance, and rater behavior; parameters were estimated with MCMC. Results: The model recovered simulated learners' competencies, with significant correlations to the generating competencies across all ACGME domains despite a non-deterministic pipeline. It estimated case difficulty by competency and showed stable rater detection (sensitivity) and criteria (severity/leniency thresholds) across AI raters using identical models/prompts but different seeds. We also propose a staged "safety blueprint" for deploying AI tools with learners, tied to entrustment-based validation milestones. Conclusions: Combining a purpose-built virtual patient platform with a principled psychometric model enables robust, interpretable, generalizable competency estimates and supports validation of AI-assisted assessment prior to use with human learners.