Automating the Diagnosis of Human Vision Disorders by Cross-modal 3D Generation

Understanding the hidden mechanisms behind human's visual perception is a fundamental quest in neuroscience, underpins a wide variety of critical applications, e.g. clinical diagnosis. To that end, investigating into the neural responses of human mind activities, such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), has been a significant research vehicle. However, analyzing fMRI signals is challenging, costly, daunting, and demanding for professional training. Despite remarkable progress in artificial intelligence (AI) based fMRI analysis, existing solutions are limited and far away from being clinically meaningful. In this context, we leap forward to demonstrate how AI can go beyond the current state of the art by decoding fMRI into visually plausible 3D visuals, enabling automatic clinical analysis of fMRI data, even without healthcare professionals. Innovationally, we reformulate the task of analyzing fMRI data as a conditional 3D scene reconstruction problem. We design a novel cross-modal 3D scene representation learning method, Brain3D, that takes as input the fMRI data of a subject who was presented with a 2D object image, and yields as output the corresponding 3D object visuals. Importantly, we show that in simulated scenarios our AI agent captures the distinct functionalities of each region of human vision system as well as their intricate interplay relationships, aligning remarkably with the established discoveries of neuroscience. Non-expert diagnosis indicate that Brain3D can successfully identify the disordered brain regions, such as V1, V2, V3, V4, and the medial temporal lobe (MTL) within the human visual system. We also present results in cross-modal 3D visual construction setting, showcasing the perception quality of our 3D scene generation.

FaceGuard: Proactive Deepfake Detection

Existing deepfake-detection methods focus on passive detection, i.e., they detect fake face images via exploiting the artifacts produced during deepfake manipulation. A key limitation of passive detection is that it cannot detect fake faces that are generated by new deepfake generation methods. In this work, we propose FaceGuard, a proactive deepfake-detection framework. FaceGuard embeds a watermark into a real face image before it is published on social media. Given a face image that claims to be an individual (e.g., Nicolas Cage), FaceGuard extracts a watermark from it and predicts the face image to be fake if the extracted watermark does not match well with the individual's ground truth one. A key component of FaceGuard is a new deep-learning-based watermarking method, which is 1) robust to normal image post-processing such as JPEG compression, Gaussian blurring, cropping, and resizing, but 2) fragile to deepfake manipulation. Our evaluation on multiple datasets shows that FaceGuard can detect deepfakes accurately and outperforms existing methods.