Thinking Racial Bias in Fair Forgery Detection: Models, Datasets and Evaluations

Due to the successful development of deep image generation technology, forgery detection plays a more important role in social and economic security. Racial bias has not been explored thoroughly in the deep forgery detection field. In the paper, we first contribute a dedicated dataset called the Fair Forgery Detection (FairFD) dataset, where we prove the racial bias of public state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Different from existing forgery detection datasets, the self-construct FairFD dataset contains a balanced racial ratio and diverse forgery generation images with the largest-scale subjects. Additionally, we identify the problems with naive fairness metrics when benchmarking forgery detection models. To comprehensively evaluate fairness, we design novel metrics including Approach Averaged Metric and Utility Regularized Metric, which can avoid deceptive results. Extensive experiments conducted with nine representative forgery detection models demonstrate the value of the proposed dataset and the reasonability of the designed fairness metrics. We also conduct more in-depth analyses to offer more insights to inspire researchers in the community.

SUMix: Mixup with Semantic and Uncertain Information

Mixup data augmentation approaches have been applied for various tasks of deep learning to improve the generalization ability of deep neural networks. Some existing approaches CutMix, SaliencyMix, etc. randomly replace a patch in one image with patches from another to generate the mixed image. Similarly, the corresponding labels are linearly combined by a fixed ratio $\lambda$ by l. The objects in two images may be overlapped during the mixing process, so some semantic information is corrupted in the mixed samples. In this case, the mixed image does not match the mixed label information. Besides, such a label may mislead the deep learning model training, which results in poor performance. To solve this problem, we proposed a novel approach named SUMix to learn the mixing ratio as well as the uncertainty for the mixed samples during the training process. First, we design a learnable similarity function to compute an accurate mix ratio. Second, an approach is investigated as a regularized term to model the uncertainty of the mixed samples. We conduct experiments on five image benchmarks, and extensive experimental results imply that our method is capable of improving the performance of classifiers with different cutting-based mixup approaches. The source code is available at https://github.com/JinXins/SUMix.

IRSAM: Advancing Segment Anything Model for Infrared Small Target Detection

The recent Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a significant advancement in natural image segmentation, exhibiting potent zero-shot performance suitable for various downstream image segmentation tasks. However, directly utilizing the pretrained SAM for Infrared Small Target Detection (IRSTD) task falls short in achieving satisfying performance due to a notable domain gap between natural and infrared images. Unlike a visible light camera, a thermal imager reveals an object's temperature distribution by capturing infrared radiation. Small targets often show a subtle temperature transition at the object's boundaries. To address this issue, we propose the IRSAM model for IRSTD, which improves SAM's encoder-decoder architecture to learn better feature representation of infrared small objects. Specifically, we design a Perona-Malik diffusion (PMD)-based block and incorporate it into multiple levels of SAM's encoder to help it capture essential structural features while suppressing noise. Additionally, we devise a Granularity-Aware Decoder (GAD) to fuse the multi-granularity feature from the encoder to capture structural information that may be lost in long-distance modeling. Extensive experiments on the public datasets, including NUAA-SIRST, NUDT-SIRST, and IRSTD-1K, validate the design choice of IRSAM and its significant superiority over representative state-of-the-art methods. The source code are available at: github.com/IPIC-Lab/IRSAM.

Federated Face Forgery Detection Learning with Personalized Representation

Deep generator technology can produce high-quality fake videos that are indistinguishable, posing a serious social threat. Traditional forgery detection methods directly centralized training on data and lacked consideration of information sharing in non-public video data scenarios and data privacy. Naturally, the federated learning strategy can be applied for privacy protection, which aggregates model parameters of clients but not original data. However, simple federated learning can't achieve satisfactory performance because of poor generalization capabilities for the real hybrid-domain forgery dataset. To solve the problem, the paper proposes a novel federated face forgery detection learning with personalized representation. The designed Personalized Forgery Representation Learning aims to learn the personalized representation of each client to improve the detection performance of individual client models. In addition, a personalized federated learning training strategy is utilized to update the parameters of the distributed detection model. Here collaborative training is conducted on multiple distributed client devices, and shared representations of these client models are uploaded to the server side for aggregation. Experiments on several public face forgery detection datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm compared with state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at \emph{https://github.com/GANG370/PFR-Forgery.}

Imperceptible Face Forgery Attack via Adversarial Semantic Mask

With the great development of generative model techniques, face forgery detection draws more and more attention in the related field. Researchers find that existing face forgery models are still vulnerable to adversarial examples with generated pixel perturbations in the global image. These generated adversarial samples still can't achieve satisfactory performance because of the high detectability. To address these problems, we propose an Adversarial Semantic Mask Attack framework (ASMA) which can generate adversarial examples with good transferability and invisibility. Specifically, we propose a novel adversarial semantic mask generative model, which can constrain generated perturbations in local semantic regions for good stealthiness. The designed adaptive semantic mask selection strategy can effectively leverage the class activation values of different semantic regions, and further ensure better attack transferability and stealthiness. Extensive experiments on the public face forgery dataset prove the proposed method achieves superior performance compared with several representative adversarial attack methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/clawerO-O/ASMA.

CLIP-Driven Cloth-Agnostic Feature Learning for Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) has shown impressive performance in short-term Person Re-Identification (ReID) due to its ability to extract high-level semantic features of pedestrians, yet its direct application to Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification (CC-ReID) faces challenges due to CLIP's image encoder overly focusing on clothes clues. To address this, we propose a novel framework called CLIP-Driven Cloth-Agnostic Feature Learning (CCAF) for CC-ReID. Accordingly, two modules were custom-designed: the Invariant Feature Prompting (IFP) and the Clothes Feature Minimization (CFM). These modules guide the model to extract cloth-agnostic features positively and attenuate clothes-related features negatively. Specifically, IFP is designed to extract fine-grained semantic features unrelated to clothes from the raw image, guided by the cloth-agnostic text prompts. This module first covers the clothes in the raw image at the pixel level to obtain the shielding image and then utilizes CLIP's knowledge to generate cloth-agnostic text prompts. Subsequently, it aligns the raw image-text and the raw image-shielding image in the feature space, emphasizing discriminative clues related to identity but unrelated to clothes. Furthermore, CFM is designed to examine and weaken the image encoder's ability to extract clothes features. It first generates text prompts corresponding to clothes pixels. Then, guided by these clothes text prompts, it iteratively examines and disentangles clothes features from pedestrian features, ultimately retaining inherent discriminative features. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed CCAF, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on several popular CC-ReID benchmarks without any additional inference time.

Pulmonary Embolism Mortality Prediction Using Multimodal Learning Based on Computed Tomography Angiography and Clinical Data

Purpose: Pulmonary embolism (PE) is a significant cause of mortality in the United States. The objective of this study is to implement deep learning (DL) models using Computed Tomography Pulmonary Angiography (CTPA), clinical data, and PE Severity Index (PESI) scores to predict PE mortality. Materials and Methods: 918 patients (median age 64 years, range 13-99 years, 52% female) with 3,978 CTPAs were identified via retrospective review across three institutions. To predict survival, an AI model was used to extract disease-related imaging features from CTPAs. Imaging features and/or clinical variables were then incorporated into DL models to predict survival outcomes. Four models were developed as follows: (1) using CTPA imaging features only; (2) using clinical variables only; (3) multimodal, integrating both CTPA and clinical variables; and (4) multimodal fused with calculated PESI score. Performance and contribution from each modality were evaluated using concordance index (c-index) and Net Reclassification Improvement, respectively. Performance was compared to PESI predictions using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Kaplan-Meier analysis was performed to stratify patients into high- and low-risk groups. Additional factor-risk analysis was conducted to account for right ventricular (RV) dysfunction. Results: For both data sets, the PESI-fused and multimodal models achieved higher c-indices than PESI alone. Following stratification of patients into high- and low-risk groups by multimodal and PESI-fused models, mortality outcomes differed significantly (both p<0.001). A strong correlation was found between high-risk grouping and RV dysfunction. Conclusions: Multiomic DL models incorporating CTPA features, clinical data, and PESI achieved higher c-indices than PESI alone for PE survival prediction.

An Information Compensation Framework for Zero-Shot Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Zero-shot human skeleton-based action recognition aims to construct a model that can recognize actions outside the categories seen during training. Previous research has focused on aligning sequences' visual and semantic spatial distributions. However, these methods extract semantic features simply. They ignore that proper prompt design for rich and fine-grained action cues can provide robust representation space clustering. In order to alleviate the problem of insufficient information available for skeleton sequences, we design an information compensation learning framework from an information-theoretic perspective to improve zero-shot action recognition accuracy with a multi-granularity semantic interaction mechanism. Inspired by ensemble learning, we propose a multi-level alignment (MLA) approach to compensate information for action classes. MLA aligns multi-granularity embeddings with visual embedding through a multi-head scoring mechanism to distinguish semantically similar action names and visually similar actions. Furthermore, we introduce a new loss function sampling method to obtain a tight and robust representation. Finally, these multi-granularity semantic embeddings are synthesized to form a proper decision surface for classification. Significant action recognition performance is achieved when evaluated on the challenging NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD benchmarks and validate that multi-granularity semantic features facilitate the differentiation of action clusters with similar visual features.

MindSemantix: Deciphering Brain Visual Experiences with a Brain-Language Model

Deciphering the human visual experience through brain activities captured by fMRI represents a compelling and cutting-edge challenge in the field of neuroscience research. Compared to merely predicting the viewed image itself, decoding brain activity into meaningful captions provides a higher-level interpretation and summarization of visual information, which naturally enhances the application flexibility in real-world situations. In this work, we introduce MindSemantix, a novel multi-modal framework that enables LLMs to comprehend visually-evoked semantic content in brain activity. Our MindSemantix explores a more ideal brain captioning paradigm by weaving LLMs into brain activity analysis, crafting a seamless, end-to-end Brain-Language Model. To effectively capture semantic information from brain responses, we propose Brain-Text Transformer, utilizing a Brain Q-Former as its core architecture. It integrates a pre-trained brain encoder with a frozen LLM to achieve multi-modal alignment of brain-vision-language and establish a robust brain-language correspondence. To enhance the generalizability of neural representations, we pre-train our brain encoder on a large-scale, cross-subject fMRI dataset using self-supervised learning techniques. MindSemantix provides more feasibility to downstream brain decoding tasks such as stimulus reconstruction. Conditioned by MindSemantix captioning, our framework facilitates this process by integrating with advanced generative models like Stable Diffusion and excels in understanding brain visual perception. MindSemantix generates high-quality captions that are deeply rooted in the visual and semantic information derived from brain activity. This approach has demonstrated substantial quantitative improvements over prior art. Our code will be released.

Multi-modality Regional Alignment Network for Covid X-Ray Survival Prediction and Report Generation

In response to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, advanced automated technologies have emerged as valuable tools to aid healthcare professionals in managing an increased workload by improving radiology report generation and prognostic analysis. This study proposes Multi-modality Regional Alignment Network (MRANet), an explainable model for radiology report generation and survival prediction that focuses on high-risk regions. By learning spatial correlation in the detector, MRANet visually grounds region-specific descriptions, providing robust anatomical regions with a completion strategy. The visual features of each region are embedded using a novel survival attention mechanism, offering spatially and risk-aware features for sentence encoding while maintaining global coherence across tasks. A cross LLMs alignment is employed to enhance the image-to-text transfer process, resulting in sentences rich with clinical detail and improved explainability for radiologist. Multi-center experiments validate both MRANet's overall performance and each module's composition within the model, encouraging further advancements in radiology report generation research emphasizing clinical interpretation and trustworthiness in AI models applied to medical studies. The code is available at https://github.com/zzs95/MRANet.