Impact of Language Guidance: A Reproducibility Study

Modern deep-learning architectures need large amounts of data to produce state-of-the-art results. Annotating such huge datasets is time-consuming, expensive, and prone to human error. Recent advances in self-supervised learning allow us to train huge models without explicit annotation. Contrastive learning is a popular paradigm in self-supervised learning. Recent works like SimCLR and CLIP rely on image augmentations or directly minimizing cross-modal loss between image and text. Banani et al. (2023) propose to use language guidance to sample view pairs. They claim that language enables better conceptual similarity, eliminating the effects of visual variability. We reproduce their experiments to verify their claims and find that their dataset, RedCaps, contains low-quality captions. We use an off-the-shelf image captioning model, BLIP-2, to replace the captions and improve performance, and we also devise a new metric to evaluate the semantic capabilities of self-supervised models based on interpretability methods.

Provenance Detection for AI-Generated Images: Combining Perceptual Hashing, Homomorphic Encryption, and AI Detection Models

As AI-generated sensitive images become more prevalent, identifying their source is crucial for distinguishing them from real images. Conventional image watermarking methods are vulnerable to common transformations like filters, lossy compression, and screenshots, often applied during social media sharing. Watermarks can also be faked or removed if models are open-sourced or leaked since images can be rewatermarked. We have developed a three-part framework for secure, transformation-resilient AI content provenance detection, to address these limitations. We develop an adversarially robust state-of-the-art perceptual hashing model, DinoHash, derived from DINOV2, which is robust to common transformations like filters, compression, and crops. Additionally, we integrate a Multi-Party Fully Homomorphic Encryption~(MP-FHE) scheme into our proposed framework to ensure the protection of both user queries and registry privacy. Furthermore, we improve previous work on AI-generated media detection. This approach is useful in cases where the content is absent from our registry. DinoHash significantly improves average bit accuracy by 12% over state-of-the-art watermarking and perceptual hashing methods while maintaining superior true positive rate (TPR) and false positive rate (FPR) tradeoffs across various transformations. Our AI-generated media detection results show a 25% improvement in classification accuracy on commonly used real-world AI image generators over existing algorithms. By combining perceptual hashing, MP-FHE, and an AI content detection model, our proposed framework provides better robustness and privacy compared to previous work.

Benchmarking Object Detectors with COCO: A New Path Forward

The Common Objects in Context (COCO) dataset has been instrumental in benchmarking object detectors over the past decade. Like every dataset, COCO contains subtle errors and imperfections stemming from its annotation procedure. With the advent of high-performing models, we ask whether these errors of COCO are hindering its utility in reliably benchmarking further progress. In search for an answer, we inspect thousands of masks from COCO (2017 version) and uncover different types of errors such as imprecise mask boundaries, non-exhaustively annotated instances, and mislabeled masks. Due to the prevalence of COCO, we choose to correct these errors to maintain continuity with prior research. We develop COCO-ReM (Refined Masks), a cleaner set of annotations with visibly better mask quality than COCO-2017. We evaluate fifty object detectors and find that models that predict visually sharper masks score higher on COCO-ReM, affirming that they were being incorrectly penalized due to errors in COCO-2017. Moreover, our models trained using COCO-ReM converge faster and score higher than their larger variants trained using COCO-2017, highlighting the importance of data quality in improving object detectors. With these findings, we advocate using COCO-ReM for future object detection research. Our dataset is available at https://cocorem.xyz