Deepfake Media Generation and Detection in the Generative AI Era: A Survey and Outlook

With the recent advancements in generative modeling, the realism of deepfake content has been increasing at a steady pace, even reaching the point where people often fail to detect manipulated media content online, thus being deceived into various kinds of scams. In this paper, we survey deepfake generation and detection techniques, including the most recent developments in the field, such as diffusion models and Neural Radiance Fields. Our literature review covers all deepfake media types, comprising image, video, audio and multimodal (audio-visual) content. We identify various kinds of deepfakes, according to the procedure used to alter or generate the fake content. We further construct a taxonomy of deepfake generation and detection methods, illustrating the important groups of methods and the domains where these methods are applied. Next, we gather datasets used for deepfake detection and provide updated rankings of the best performing deepfake detectors on the most popular datasets. In addition, we develop a novel multimodal benchmark to evaluate deepfake detectors on out-of-distribution content. The results indicate that state-of-the-art detectors fail to generalize to deepfake content generated by unseen deepfake generators. Finally, we propose future directions to obtain robust and powerful deepfake detectors. Our project page and new benchmark are available at https://github.com/CroitoruAlin/biodeep.

All Languages Matter: Evaluating LMMs on Culturally Diverse 100 Languages

Existing Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) generally focus on only a few regions and languages. As LMMs continue to improve, it is increasingly important to ensure they understand cultural contexts, respect local sensitivities, and support low-resource languages, all while effectively integrating corresponding visual cues. In pursuit of culturally diverse global multimodal models, our proposed All Languages Matter Benchmark (ALM-bench) represents the largest and most comprehensive effort to date for evaluating LMMs across 100 languages. ALM-bench challenges existing models by testing their ability to understand and reason about culturally diverse images paired with text in various languages, including many low-resource languages traditionally underrepresented in LMM research. The benchmark offers a robust and nuanced evaluation framework featuring various question formats, including true/false, multiple choice, and open-ended questions, which are further divided into short and long-answer categories. ALM-bench design ensures a comprehensive assessment of a model's ability to handle varied levels of difficulty in visual and linguistic reasoning. To capture the rich tapestry of global cultures, ALM-bench carefully curates content from 13 distinct cultural aspects, ranging from traditions and rituals to famous personalities and celebrations. Through this, ALM-bench not only provides a rigorous testing ground for state-of-the-art open and closed-source LMMs but also highlights the importance of cultural and linguistic inclusivity, encouraging the development of models that can serve diverse global populations effectively. Our benchmark is publicly available.

DLCR: A Generative Data Expansion Framework via Diffusion for Clothes-Changing Person Re-ID

With the recent exhibited strength of generative diffusion models, an open research question is \textit{if images generated by these models can be used to learn better visual representations}. While this generative data expansion may suffice for easier visual tasks, we explore its efficacy on a more difficult discriminative task: clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID). CC-ReID aims to match people appearing in non-overlapping cameras, even when they change their clothes across cameras. Not only are current CC-ReID models constrained by the limited diversity of clothing in current CC-ReID datasets, but generating additional data that retains important personal features for accurate identification is a current challenge. To address this issue we propose DLCR, a novel data expansion framework that leverages pre-trained diffusion and large language models (LLMs) to accurately generate diverse images of individuals in varied attire. We generate additional data for five benchmark CC-ReID datasets (PRCC, CCVID, LaST, VC-Clothes, and LTCC) and \textbf{increase their clothing diversity by \boldmath{$10$}x, totaling over \boldmath{$2.1$}M images generated}. DLCR employs diffusion-based text-guided inpainting, conditioned on clothing prompts constructed using LLMs, to generate synthetic data that only modifies a subject's clothes while preserving their personally identifiable features. With this massive increase in data, we introduce two novel strategies - progressive learning and test-time prediction refinement - that respectively reduce training time and further boosts CC-ReID performance. On the PRCC dataset, we obtain a large top-1 accuracy improvement of $11.3\%$ by training CAL, a previous state of the art (SOTA) method, with DLCR-generated data. We publicly release our code and generated data for each dataset here: \url{https://github.com/CroitoruAlin/dlcr}.

CityGuessr: City-Level Video Geo-Localization on a Global Scale

Video geolocalization is a crucial problem in current times. Given just a video, ascertaining where it was captured from can have a plethora of advantages. The problem of worldwide geolocalization has been tackled before, but only using the image modality. Its video counterpart remains relatively unexplored. Meanwhile, video geolocalization has also garnered some attention in the recent past, but the existing methods are all restricted to specific regions. This motivates us to explore the problem of video geolocalization at a global scale. Hence, we propose a novel problem of worldwide video geolocalization with the objective of hierarchically predicting the correct city, state/province, country, and continent, given a video. However, no large scale video datasets that have extensive worldwide coverage exist, to train models for solving this problem. To this end, we introduce a new dataset, CityGuessr68k comprising of 68,269 videos from 166 cities all over the world. We also propose a novel baseline approach to this problem, by designing a transformer-based architecture comprising of an elegant Self-Cross Attention module for incorporating scenes as well as a TextLabel Alignment strategy for distilling knowledge from textlabels in feature space. To further enhance our location prediction, we also utilize soft-scene labels. Finally we demonstrate the performance of our method on our new dataset as well as Mapillary(MSLS). Our code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/ParthPK/CityGuessr

Hierarchical Preference Optimization: Learning to achieve goals via feasible subgoals prediction

This work introduces Hierarchical Preference Optimization (HPO), a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) that addresses non-stationarity and infeasible subgoal generation issues when solving complex robotic control tasks. HPO leverages maximum entropy reinforcement learning combined with token-level Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), eliminating the need for pre-trained reference policies that are typically unavailable in challenging robotic scenarios. Mathematically, we formulate HRL as a bi-level optimization problem and transform it into a primitive-regularized DPO formulation, ensuring feasible subgoal generation and avoiding degenerate solutions. Extensive experiments on challenging robotic navigation and manipulation tasks demonstrate impressive performance of HPO, where it shows an improvement of up to 35% over the baselines. Furthermore, ablation studies validate our design choices, and quantitative analyses confirm the ability of HPO to mitigate non-stationarity and infeasible subgoal generation issues in HRL.

Exploring Local Memorization in Diffusion Models via Bright Ending Attention

In this paper, we identify and leverage a novel `bright ending' (BE) anomaly in diffusion models prone to memorizing training images to address a new task: locating localized memorization regions within these models. BE refers to a distinct cross-attention pattern observed in text-to-image generations using diffusion models. Specifically, memorized image patches exhibit significantly greater attention to the end token during the final inference step compared to non-memorized patches. This attention map effectively highlights regions where the generated image replicates training data. Furthermore, driven by our observation that local memorization significantly underperforms in existing tasks of measuring, detecting, and mitigating memorization in diffusion models compared to global memorization, we propose a simple yet effective method to integrate BE and the results of the new localization task into these existing frameworks. This integration effectively improves their performances by narrowing the performance gap caused by local memorization. Our results not only demonstrate the successful execution of the new localization task but also establish new state-of-the-art performance across all existing tasks, underscoring the significance of the BE phenomenon.

Investigating Memorization in Video Diffusion Models

Diffusion models, widely used for image and video generation, face a significant limitation: the risk of memorizing and reproducing training data during inference, potentially generating unauthorized copyrighted content. While prior research has focused on image diffusion models (IDMs), video diffusion models (VDMs) remain underexplored. To address this gap, we first formally define the two types of memorization in VDMs (content memorization and motion memorization) in a practical way that focuses on privacy preservation and applies to all generation types. We then introduce new metrics specifically designed to separately assess content and motion memorization in VDMs. Additionally, we curate a dataset of text prompts that are most prone to triggering memorization when used as conditioning in VDMs. By leveraging these prompts, we generate diverse videos from various open-source VDMs, successfully extracting numerous training videos from each tested model. Through the application of our proposed metrics, we systematically analyze memorization across various pretrained VDMs, including text-conditional and unconditional models, on a variety of datasets. Our comprehensive study reveals that memorization is widespread across all tested VDMs, indicating that VDMs can also memorize image training data in addition to video datasets. Finally, we propose efficient and effective detection strategies for both content and motion memorization, offering a foundational approach for improving privacy in VDMs.

FinePseudo: Improving Pseudo-Labelling through Temporal-Alignablity for Semi-Supervised Fine-Grained Action Recognition

Real-life applications of action recognition often require a fine-grained understanding of subtle movements, e.g., in sports analytics, user interactions in AR/VR, and surgical videos. Although fine-grained actions are more costly to annotate, existing semi-supervised action recognition has mainly focused on coarse-grained action recognition. Since fine-grained actions are more challenging due to the absence of scene bias, classifying these actions requires an understanding of action-phases. Hence, existing coarse-grained semi-supervised methods do not work effectively. In this work, we for the first time thoroughly investigate semi-supervised fine-grained action recognition (FGAR). We observe that alignment distances like dynamic time warping (DTW) provide a suitable action-phase-aware measure for comparing fine-grained actions, a concept previously unexploited in FGAR. However, since regular DTW distance is pairwise and assumes strict alignment between pairs, it is not directly suitable for classifying fine-grained actions. To utilize such alignment distances in a limited-label setting, we propose an Alignability-Verification-based Metric learning technique to effectively discriminate between fine-grained action pairs. Our learnable alignability score provides a better phase-aware measure, which we use to refine the pseudo-labels of the primary video encoder. Our collaborative pseudo-labeling-based framework `\textit{FinePseudo}' significantly outperforms prior methods on four fine-grained action recognition datasets: Diving48, FineGym99, FineGym288, and FineDiving, and shows improvement on existing coarse-grained datasets: Kinetics400 and Something-SomethingV2. We also demonstrate the robustness of our collaborative pseudo-labeling in handling novel unlabeled classes in open-world semi-supervised setups. Project Page: https://daveishan.github.io/finepsuedo-webpage/.

Sync from the Sea: Retrieving Alignable Videos from Large-Scale Datasets

Temporal video alignment aims to synchronize the key events like object interactions or action phase transitions in two videos. Such methods could benefit various video editing, processing, and understanding tasks. However, existing approaches operate under the restrictive assumption that a suitable video pair for alignment is given, significantly limiting their broader applicability. To address this, we re-pose temporal alignment as a search problem and introduce the task of Alignable Video Retrieval (AVR). Given a query video, our approach can identify well-alignable videos from a large collection of clips and temporally synchronize them to the query. To achieve this, we make three key contributions: 1) we introduce DRAQ, a video alignability indicator to identify and re-rank the best alignable video from a set of candidates; 2) we propose an effective and generalizable frame-level video feature design to improve the alignment performance of several off-the-shelf feature representations, and 3) we propose a novel benchmark and evaluation protocol for AVR using cycle-consistency metrics. Our experiments on 3 datasets, including large-scale Kinetics700, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in identifying alignable video pairs from diverse datasets. Project Page: https://daveishan.github.io/avr-webpage/.

GAReT: Cross-view Video Geolocalization with Adapters and Auto-Regressive Transformers

Cross-view video geo-localization (CVGL) aims to derive GPS trajectories from street-view videos by aligning them with aerial-view images. Despite their promising performance, current CVGL methods face significant challenges. These methods use camera and odometry data, typically absent in real-world scenarios. They utilize multiple adjacent frames and various encoders for feature extraction, resulting in high computational costs. Moreover, these approaches independently predict each street-view frame's location, resulting in temporally inconsistent GPS trajectories. To address these challenges, in this work, we propose GAReT, a fully transformer-based method for CVGL that does not require camera and odometry data. We introduce GeoAdapter, a transformer-adapter module designed to efficiently aggregate image-level representations and adapt them for video inputs. Specifically, we train a transformer encoder on video frames and aerial images, then freeze the encoder to optimize the GeoAdapter module to obtain video-level representation. To address temporally inconsistent trajectories, we introduce TransRetriever, an encoder-decoder transformer model that predicts GPS locations of street-view frames by encoding top-k nearest neighbor predictions per frame and auto-regressively decoding the best neighbor based on the previous frame's predictions. Our method's effectiveness is validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/manupillai308/GAReT.