Exploring a Patch-Wise Approach for Privacy-Preserving Fake ID Detection

In an increasingly digitalized world, verifying the authenticity of ID documents has become a critical challenge for real-life applications such as digital banking, crypto-exchanges, renting, etc. This study focuses on the topic of fake ID detection, covering several limitations in the field. In particular, no publicly available data from real ID documents exists, and most studies rely on proprietary in-house databases that are not available due to privacy reasons. In order to shed some light on this critical challenge that makes difficult to advance in the field, we explore a trade-off between privacy (i.e., amount of sensitive data available) and performance, proposing a novel patch-wise approach for privacy-preserving fake ID detection. Our proposed approach explores how privacy can be enhanced through: i) two levels of anonymization for an ID document (i.e., fully- and pseudo-anonymized), and ii) different patch size configurations, varying the amount of sensitive data visible in the patch image. Also, state-of-the-art methods such as Vision Transformers and Foundation Models are considered in the analysis. The experimental framework shows that, on an unseen database (DLC-2021), our proposal achieves 13.91% and 0% EERs at patch and ID document level, showing a good generalization to other databases. In addition to this exploration, another key contribution of our study is the release of the first publicly available database that contains 48,400 patches from both real and fake ID documents, along with the experimental framework and models, which will be available in our GitHub.

Are Vision-Language Models Ready for Dietary Assessment? Exploring the Next Frontier in AI-Powered Food Image Recognition

Automatic dietary assessment based on food images remains a challenge, requiring precise food detection, segmentation, and classification. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer new possibilities by integrating visual and textual reasoning. In this study, we evaluate six state-of-the-art VLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Moondream, DeepSeek, and LLaVA), analyzing their capabilities in food recognition at different levels. For the experimental framework, we introduce the FoodNExTDB, a unique food image database that contains 9,263 expert-labeled images across 10 categories (e.g., "protein source"), 62 subcategories (e.g., "poultry"), and 9 cooking styles (e.g., "grilled"). In total, FoodNExTDB includes 50k nutritional labels generated by seven experts who manually annotated all images in the database. Also, we propose a novel evaluation metric, Expert-Weighted Recall (EWR), that accounts for the inter-annotator variability. Results show that closed-source models outperform open-source ones, achieving over 90% EWR in recognizing food products in images containing a single product. Despite their potential, current VLMs face challenges in fine-grained food recognition, particularly in distinguishing subtle differences in cooking styles and visually similar food items, which limits their reliability for automatic dietary assessment. The FoodNExTDB database is publicly available at https://github.com/AI4Food/FoodNExtDB.

MINT-Demo: Membership Inference Test Demonstrator

We present the Membership Inference Test Demonstrator, to emphasize the need for more transparent machine learning training processes. MINT is a technique for experimentally determining whether certain data has been used during the training of machine learning models. We conduct experiments with popular face recognition models and 5 public databases containing over 22M images. Promising results, up to 89% accuracy are achieved, suggesting that it is possible to recognize if an AI model has been trained with specific data. Finally, we present a MINT platform as demonstrator of this technology aimed to promote transparency in AI training.

Is My Text in Your AI Model? Gradient-based Membership Inference Test applied to LLMs

This work adapts and studies the gradient-based Membership Inference Test (gMINT) to the classification of text based on LLMs. MINT is a general approach intended to determine if given data was used for training machine learning models, and this work focuses on its application to the domain of Natural Language Processing. Using gradient-based analysis, the MINT model identifies whether particular data samples were included during the language model training phase, addressing growing concerns about data privacy in machine learning. The method was evaluated in seven Transformer-based models and six datasets comprising over 2.5 million sentences, focusing on text classification tasks. Experimental results demonstrate MINTs robustness, achieving AUC scores between 85% and 99%, depending on data size and model architecture. These findings highlight MINTs potential as a scalable and reliable tool for auditing machine learning models, ensuring transparency, safeguarding sensitive data, and fostering ethical compliance in the deployment of AI/NLP technologies.

M2LADS Demo: A System for Generating Multimodal Learning Analytics Dashboards

We present a demonstration of a web-based system called M2LADS ("System for Generating Multimodal Learning Analytics Dashboards"), designed to integrate, synchronize, visualize, and analyze multimodal data recorded during computer-based learning sessions with biosensors. This system presents a range of biometric and behavioral data on web-based dashboards, providing detailed insights into various physiological and activity-based metrics. The multimodal data visualized include electroencephalogram (EEG) data for assessing attention and brain activity, heart rate metrics, eye-tracking data to measure visual attention, webcam video recordings, and activity logs of the monitored tasks. M2LADS aims to assist data scientists in two key ways: (1) by providing a comprehensive view of participants' experiences, displaying all data categorized by the activities in which participants are engaged, and (2) by synchronizing all biosignals and videos, facilitating easier data relabeling if any activity information contains errors.

SMARTe-VR: Student Monitoring and Adaptive Response Technology for e-learning in Virtual Reality

This work introduces SMARTe-VR, a platform for student monitoring in an immersive virtual reality environment designed for online education. SMARTe-VR is aimed to gather data for adaptive learning, focusing on facial biometrics and learning metadata. The platform allows instructors to create tailored learning sessions with video lectures, featuring an interface with an Auto QA system to evaluate understanding, interaction tools (e.g., textbook highlighting and lecture tagging), and real-time feedback. Additionally, we release a dataset containing 5 research challenges with data from 10 users in VR-based TOEIC sessions. This dataset, spanning over 25 hours, includes facial features, learning metadata, 450 responses, question difficulty levels, concept tags, and understanding labels. Alongside the database, we present preliminary experiments using Item Response Theory models, adapted for understanding detection using facial features. Two architectures were explored: a Temporal Convolutional Network for local features and a Multilayer Perceptron for global features.

KVC-onGoing: Keystroke Verification Challenge

This article presents the Keystroke Verification Challenge - onGoing (KVC-onGoing), on which researchers can easily benchmark their systems in a common platform using large-scale public databases, the Aalto University Keystroke databases, and a standard experimental protocol. The keystroke data consist of tweet-long sequences of variable transcript text from over 185,000 subjects, acquired through desktop and mobile keyboards simulating real-life conditions. The results on the evaluation set of KVC-onGoing have proved the high discriminative power of keystroke dynamics, reaching values as low as 3.33% of Equal Error Rate (EER) and 11.96% of False Non-Match Rate (FNMR) @1% False Match Rate (FMR) in the desktop scenario, and 3.61% of EER and 17.44% of FNMR @1% at FMR in the mobile scenario, significantly improving previous state-of-the-art results. Concerning demographic fairness, the analyzed scores reflect the subjects' age and gender to various extents, not negligible in a few cases. The framework runs on CodaLab.

IMPROVE: Impact of Mobile Phones on Remote Online Virtual Education

This work presents the IMPROVE dataset, designed to evaluate the effects of mobile phone usage on learners during online education. The dataset not only assesses academic performance and subjective learner feedback but also captures biometric, behavioral, and physiological signals, providing a comprehensive analysis of the impact of mobile phone use on learning. Multimodal data were collected from 120 learners in three groups with different phone interaction levels. A setup involving 16 sensors was implemented to collect data that have proven to be effective indicators for understanding learner behavior and cognition, including electroencephalography waves, videos, eye tracker, etc. The dataset includes metadata from the processed videos like face bounding boxes, facial landmarks, and Euler angles for head pose estimation. In addition, learner performance data and self-reported forms are included. Phone usage events were labeled, covering both supervisor-triggered and uncontrolled events. A semi-manual re-labeling system, using head pose and eye tracker data, is proposed to improve labeling accuracy. Technical validation confirmed signal quality, with statistical analyses revealing biometric changes during phone use.

Second FRCSyn-onGoing: Winning Solutions and Post-Challenge Analysis to Improve Face Recognition with Synthetic Data

Synthetic data is gaining increasing popularity for face recognition technologies, mainly due to the privacy concerns and challenges associated with obtaining real data, including diverse scenarios, quality, and demographic groups, among others. It also offers some advantages over real data, such as the large amount of data that can be generated or the ability to customize it to adapt to specific problem-solving needs. To effectively use such data, face recognition models should also be specifically designed to exploit synthetic data to its fullest potential. In order to promote the proposal of novel Generative AI methods and synthetic data, and investigate the application of synthetic data to better train face recognition systems, we introduce the 2nd FRCSyn-onGoing challenge, based on the 2nd Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn), originally launched at CVPR 2024. This is an ongoing challenge that provides researchers with an accessible platform to benchmark i) the proposal of novel Generative AI methods and synthetic data, and ii) novel face recognition systems that are specifically proposed to take advantage of synthetic data. We focus on exploring the use of synthetic data both individually and in combination with real data to solve current challenges in face recognition such as demographic bias, domain adaptation, and performance constraints in demanding situations, such as age disparities between training and testing, changes in the pose, or occlusions. Very interesting findings are obtained in this second edition, including a direct comparison with the first one, in which synthetic databases were restricted to DCFace and GANDiffFace.

VideoRun2D: Cost-Effective Markerless Motion Capture for Sprint Biomechanics

Sprinting is a determinant ability, especially in team sports. The kinematics of the sprint have been studied in the past using different methods specially developed considering human biomechanics and, among those methods, markerless systems stand out as very cost-effective. On the other hand, we have now multiple general methods for pixel and body tracking based on recent machine learning breakthroughs with excellent performance in body tracking, but these excellent trackers do not generally consider realistic human biomechanics. This investigation first adapts two of these general trackers (MoveNet and CoTracker) for realistic biomechanical analysis and then evaluate them in comparison to manual tracking (with key points manually marked using the software Kinovea). Our best resulting markerless body tracker particularly adapted for sprint biomechanics is termed VideoRun2D. The experimental development and assessment of VideoRun2D is reported on forty sprints recorded with a video camera from 5 different subjects, focusing our analysis in 3 key angles in sprint biomechanics: inclination of the trunk, flex extension of the hip and the knee. The CoTracker method showed huge differences compared to the manual labeling approach. However, the angle curves were correctly estimated by the MoveNet method, finding errors between 3.2{\deg} and 5.5{\deg}. In conclusion, our proposed VideoRun2D based on MoveNet core seems to be a helpful tool for evaluating sprint kinematics in some scenarios. On the other hand, the observed precision of this first version of VideoRun2D as a markerless sprint analysis system may not be yet enough for highly demanding applications. Future research lines towards that purpose are also discussed at the end: better tracking post-processing and user- and time-dependent adaptation.