In the age of increasingly realistic generative AI, robust deepfake detection is essential for mitigating fraud and disinformation. While many deepfake detectors report high accuracy on academic datasets, we show that these academic benchmarks are out of date and not representative of real-world deepfakes. We introduce Deepfake-Eval-2024, a new deepfake detection benchmark consisting of in-the-wild deepfakes collected from social media and deepfake detection platform users in 2024. Deepfake-Eval-2024 consists of 45 hours of videos, 56.5 hours of audio, and 1,975 images, encompassing the latest manipulation technologies. The benchmark contains diverse media content from 88 different websites in 52 different languages. We find that the performance of open-source state-of-the-art deepfake detection models drops precipitously when evaluated on Deepfake-Eval-2024, with AUC decreasing by 50\% for video, 48\% for audio, and 45\% for image models compared to previous benchmarks. We also evaluate commercial deepfake detection models and models finetuned on Deepfake-Eval-2024, and find that they have superior performance to off-the-shelf open-source models, but do not yet reach the accuracy of deepfake forensic analysts. The dataset is available at https://github.com/nuriachandra/Deepfake-Eval-2024.

Person re-identification (re-ID) aims to retrieve a person's images from an image gallery, given a single instance of the person of interest. Despite several advancements, learning discriminative identity-sensitive and viewpoint invariant features for robust Person Re-identification is a major challenge owing to large pose variation of humans. This paper proposes a re-ID pipeline that utilizes the image generation capability of Generative Adversarial Networks combined with pose regression and feature fusion to achieve pose invariant feature learning. The objective is to model a given person under different viewpoints and large pose changes and extract the most discriminative features from all the appearances. The pose transformational GAN (pt-GAN) module is trained to generate a person's image in any given pose. In order to identify the most significant poses for discriminative feature extraction, a Pose Regression module is proposed. The given instance of the person is modelled in varying poses and these features are effectively combined through the Feature Fusion Network. The final re-ID model consisting of these 3 sub-blocks, alleviates the pose dependence in person re-ID and outperforms the state-of-the-art GAN based models for re-ID in 4 benchmark datasets. The proposed model is robust to occlusion, scale and illumination, thereby outperforms the state-of-the-art models in terms of improvement over baseline.

Detecting stellar clusters have always been an important research problem in Astronomy. Although images do not convey very detailed information in detecting stellar density enhancements, we attempt to understand if new machine learning techniques can reveal patterns that would assist in drawing better inferences from the available image data. This paper describes an unsupervised approach in detecting star clusters using Deep Variational Autoencoder combined with a Gaussian Mixture Model. We show that our method works significantly well in comparison with state-of-the-art detection algorithm in recognizing a variety of star clusters even in the presence of noise and distortion.