Limited Data, Unlimited Potential: A Study on ViTs Augmented by Masked Autoencoders

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become ubiquitous in computer vision. Despite their success, ViTs lack inductive biases, which can make it difficult to train them with limited data. To address this challenge, prior studies suggest training ViTs with self-supervised learning (SSL) and fine-tuning sequentially. However, we observe that jointly optimizing ViTs for the primary task and a Self-Supervised Auxiliary Task (SSAT) is surprisingly beneficial when the amount of training data is limited. We explore the appropriate SSL tasks that can be optimized alongside the primary task, the training schemes for these tasks, and the data scale at which they can be most effective. Our findings reveal that SSAT is a powerful technique that enables ViTs to leverage the unique characteristics of both the self-supervised and primary tasks, achieving better performance than typical ViTs pre-training with SSL and fine-tuning sequentially. Our experiments, conducted on 10 datasets, demonstrate that SSAT significantly improves ViT performance while reducing carbon footprint. We also confirm the effectiveness of SSAT in the video domain for deepfake detection, showcasing its generalizability. Our code is available at https://github.com/dominickrei/Limited-data-vits.

Attending Generalizability in Course of Deep Fake Detection by Exploring Multi-task Learning

This work explores various ways of exploring multi-task learning (MTL) techniques aimed at classifying videos as original or manipulated in cross-manipulation scenario to attend generalizability in deep fake scenario. The dataset used in our evaluation is FaceForensics++, which features 1000 original videos manipulated by four different techniques, with a total of 5000 videos. We conduct extensive experiments on multi-task learning and contrastive techniques, which are well studied in literature for their generalization benefits. It can be concluded that the proposed detection model is quite generalized, i.e., accurately detects manipulation methods not encountered during training as compared to the state-of-the-art.