Interactive Event Sifting using Bayesian Graph Neural Networks

Forensic analysts often use social media imagery and texts to understand important events. A primary challenge is the initial sifting of irrelevant posts. This work introduces an interactive process for training an event-centric, learning-based multimodal classification model that automates sanitization. We propose a method based on Bayesian Graph Neural Networks (BGNNs) and evaluate active learning and pseudo-labeling formulations to reduce the number of posts the analyst must manually annotate. Our results indicate that BGNNs are useful for social-media data sifting for forensics investigations of events of interest, the value of active learning and pseudo-labeling varies based on the setting, and incorporating unlabelled data from other events improves performance.

Take It Easy: Label-Adaptive Self-Rationalization for Fact Verification and Explanation Generation

Computational methods to aid journalists in the task often require adapting a model to specific domains and generating explanations. However, most automated fact-checking methods rely on three-class datasets, which do not accurately reflect real-world misinformation. Moreover, fact-checking explanations are often generated based on text summarization of evidence, failing to address the relationship between the claim and the evidence. To address these issues, we extend the self-rationalization method--typically used in natural language inference (NLI) tasks--to fact verification. We propose a label-adaptive learning approach: first, we fine-tune a model to learn veracity prediction with annotated labels (step-1 model). Then, we fine-tune the step-1 model again to learn self-rationalization, using the same data and additional annotated explanations. Our results show that our label-adaptive approach improves veracity prediction by more than ten percentage points (Macro F1) on both the PubHealth and AVeriTec datasets, outperforming the GPT-4 model. Furthermore, to address the high cost of explanation annotation, we generated 64 synthetic explanations from three large language models: GPT-4-turbo, GPT-3.5-turbo, and Llama-3-8B and few-shot fine-tune our step-1 model. The few-shot synthetic explanation fine-tuned model performed comparably to the fully fine-tuned self-rationalization model, demonstrating the potential of low-budget learning with synthetic data. Our label-adaptive self-rationalization approach presents a promising direction for future research on real-world explainable fact-checking with different labeling schemes.

Explainable Artifacts for Synthetic Western Blot Source Attribution

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have enabled generative models to produce synthetic scientific images that are indistinguishable from pristine ones, posing a challenge even for expert scientists habituated to working with such content. When exploited by organizations known as paper mills, which systematically generate fraudulent articles, these technologies can significantly contribute to the spread of misinformation about ungrounded science, potentially undermining trust in scientific research. While previous studies have explored black-box solutions, such as Convolutional Neural Networks, for identifying synthetic content, only some have addressed the challenge of generalizing across different models and providing insight into the artifacts in synthetic images that inform the detection process. This study aims to identify explainable artifacts generated by state-of-the-art generative models (e.g., Generative Adversarial Networks and Diffusion Models) and leverage them for open-set identification and source attribution (i.e., pointing to the model that created the image).

Image Provenance Analysis via Graph Encoding with Vision Transformer

Recent advances in AI-powered image editing tools have significantly lowered the barrier to image modification, raising pressing security concerns those related to spreading misinformation and disinformation on social platforms. Image provenance analysis is crucial in this context, as it identifies relevant images within a database and constructs a relationship graph by mining hidden manipulation and transformation cues, thereby providing concrete evidence chains. This paper introduces a novel end-to-end deep learning framework designed to explore the structural information of provenance graphs. Our proposed method distinguishes from previous approaches in two main ways. First, unlike earlier methods that rely on prior knowledge and have limited generalizability, our framework relies upon a patch attention mechanism to capture image provenance clues for local manipulations and global transformations, thereby enhancing graph construction performance. Second, while previous methods primarily focus on identifying tampering traces only between image pairs, they often overlook the hidden information embedded in the topology of the provenance graph. Our approach aligns the model training objectives with the final graph construction task, incorporating the overall structural information of the graph into the training process. We integrate graph structure information with the attention mechanism, enabling precise determination of the direction of transformation. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method over previous approaches, underscoring its effectiveness in addressing the challenges of image provenance analysis.

Open-Set Deepfake Detection: A Parameter-Efficient Adaptation Method with Forgery Style Mixture

Open-set face forgery detection poses significant security threats and presents substantial challenges for existing detection models. These detectors primarily have two limitations: they cannot generalize across unknown forgery domains and inefficiently adapt to new data. To address these issues, we introduce an approach that is both general and parameter-efficient for face forgery detection. It builds on the assumption that different forgery source domains exhibit distinct style statistics. Previous methods typically require fully fine-tuning pre-trained networks, consuming substantial time and computational resources. In turn, we design a forgery-style mixture formulation that augments the diversity of forgery source domains, enhancing the model's generalizability across unseen domains. Drawing on recent advancements in vision transformers (ViT) for face forgery detection, we develop a parameter-efficient ViT-based detection model that includes lightweight forgery feature extraction modules and enables the model to extract global and local forgery clues simultaneously. We only optimize the inserted lightweight modules during training, maintaining the original ViT structure with its pre-trained ImageNet weights. This training strategy effectively preserves the informative pre-trained knowledge while flexibly adapting the model to the task of Deepfake detection. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the designed model achieves state-of-the-art generalizability with significantly reduced trainable parameters, representing an important step toward open-set Deepfake detection in the wild.

Robust Domain Misinformation Detection via Multi-modal Feature Alignment

Social media misinformation harms individuals and societies and is potentialized by fast-growing multi-modal content (i.e., texts and images), which accounts for higher "credibility" than text-only news pieces. Although existing supervised misinformation detection methods have obtained acceptable performances in key setups, they may require large amounts of labeled data from various events, which can be time-consuming and tedious. In turn, directly training a model by leveraging a publicly available dataset may fail to generalize due to domain shifts between the training data (a.k.a. source domains) and the data from target domains. Most prior work on domain shift focuses on a single modality (e.g., text modality) and ignores the scenario where sufficient unlabeled target domain data may not be readily available in an early stage. The lack of data often happens due to the dynamic propagation trend (i.e., the number of posts related to fake news increases slowly before catching the public attention). We propose a novel robust domain and cross-modal approach (\textbf{RDCM}) for multi-modal misinformation detection. It reduces the domain shift by aligning the joint distribution of textual and visual modalities through an inter-domain alignment module and bridges the semantic gap between both modalities through a cross-modality alignment module. We also propose a framework that simultaneously considers application scenarios of domain generalization (in which the target domain data is unavailable) and domain adaptation (in which unlabeled target domain data is available). Evaluation results on two public multi-modal misinformation detection datasets (Pheme and Twitter Datasets) evince the superiority of the proposed model. The formal implementation of this paper can be found in this link: https://github.com/less-and-less-bugs/RDCM

Pixel-Inconsistency Modeling for Image Manipulation Localization

Digital image forensics plays a crucial role in image authentication and manipulation localization. Despite the progress powered by deep neural networks, existing forgery localization methodologies exhibit limitations when deployed to unseen datasets and perturbed images (i.e., lack of generalization and robustness to real-world applications). To circumvent these problems and aid image integrity, this paper presents a generalized and robust manipulation localization model through the analysis of pixel inconsistency artifacts. The rationale is grounded on the observation that most image signal processors (ISP) involve the demosaicing process, which introduces pixel correlations in pristine images. Moreover, manipulating operations, including splicing, copy-move, and inpainting, directly affect such pixel regularity. We, therefore, first split the input image into several blocks and design masked self-attention mechanisms to model the global pixel dependency in input images. Simultaneously, we optimize another local pixel dependency stream to mine local manipulation clues within input forgery images. In addition, we design novel Learning-to-Weight Modules (LWM) to combine features from the two streams, thereby enhancing the final forgery localization performance. To improve the training process, we propose a novel Pixel-Inconsistency Data Augmentation (PIDA) strategy, driving the model to focus on capturing inherent pixel-level artifacts instead of mining semantic forgery traces. This work establishes a comprehensive benchmark integrating 15 representative detection models across 12 datasets. Extensive experiments show that our method successfully extracts inherent pixel-inconsistency forgery fingerprints and achieve state-of-the-art generalization and robustness performances in image manipulation localization.

Information Forensics and Security: A quarter-century-long journey

Information Forensics and Security (IFS) is an active R&D area whose goal is to ensure that people use devices, data, and intellectual properties for authorized purposes and to facilitate the gathering of solid evidence to hold perpetrators accountable. For over a quarter century since the 1990s, the IFS research area has grown tremendously to address the societal needs of the digital information era. The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) has emerged as an important hub and leader in this area, and the article below celebrates some landmark technical contributions. In particular, we highlight the major technological advances on some selected focus areas in the field developed in the last 25 years from the research community and present future trends.

Large-scale Fully-Unsupervised Re-Identification

Fully-unsupervised Person and Vehicle Re-Identification have received increasing attention due to their broad applicability in surveillance, forensics, event understanding, and smart cities, without requiring any manual annotation. However, most of the prior art has been evaluated in datasets that have just a couple thousand samples. Such small-data setups often allow the use of costly techniques in time and memory footprints, such as Re-Ranking, to improve clustering results. Moreover, some previous work even pre-selects the best clustering hyper-parameters for each dataset, which is unrealistic in a large-scale fully-unsupervised scenario. In this context, this work tackles a more realistic scenario and proposes two strategies to learn from large-scale unlabeled data. The first strategy performs a local neighborhood sampling to reduce the dataset size in each iteration without violating neighborhood relationships. A second strategy leverages a novel Re-Ranking technique, which has a lower time upper bound complexity and reduces the memory complexity from O(n^2) to O(kn) with k << n. To avoid the pre-selection of specific hyper-parameter values for the clustering algorithm, we also present a novel scheduling algorithm that adjusts the density parameter during training, to leverage the diversity of samples and keep the learning robust to noisy labeling. Finally, due to the complementary knowledge learned by different models, we also introduce a co-training strategy that relies upon the permutation of predicted pseudo-labels, among the backbones, with no need for any hyper-parameters or weighting optimization. The proposed methodology outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in well-known benchmarks and in the challenging large-scale Veri-Wild dataset, with a faster and memory-efficient Re-Ranking strategy, and a large-scale, noisy-robust, and ensemble-based learning approach.

The Age of Synthetic Realities: Challenges and Opportunities

Synthetic realities are digital creations or augmentations that are contextually generated through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, leveraging extensive amounts of data to construct new narratives or realities, regardless of the intent to deceive. In this paper, we delve into the concept of synthetic realities and their implications for Digital Forensics and society at large within the rapidly advancing field of AI. We highlight the crucial need for the development of forensic techniques capable of identifying harmful synthetic creations and distinguishing them from reality. This is especially important in scenarios involving the creation and dissemination of fake news, disinformation, and misinformation. Our focus extends to various forms of media, such as images, videos, audio, and text, as we examine how synthetic realities are crafted and explore approaches to detecting these malicious creations. Additionally, we shed light on the key research challenges that lie ahead in this area. This study is of paramount importance due to the rapid progress of AI generative techniques and their impact on the fundamental principles of Forensic Science.