With the recent advancements in generative modeling, the realism of deepfake content has been increasing at a steady pace, even reaching the point where people often fail to detect manipulated media content online, thus being deceived into various kinds of scams. In this paper, we survey deepfake generation and detection techniques, including the most recent developments in the field, such as diffusion models and Neural Radiance Fields. Our literature review covers all deepfake media types, comprising image, video, audio and multimodal (audio-visual) content. We identify various kinds of deepfakes, according to the procedure used to alter or generate the fake content. We further construct a taxonomy of deepfake generation and detection methods, illustrating the important groups of methods and the domains where these methods are applied. Next, we gather datasets used for deepfake detection and provide updated rankings of the best performing deepfake detectors on the most popular datasets. In addition, we develop a novel multimodal benchmark to evaluate deepfake detectors on out-of-distribution content. The results indicate that state-of-the-art detectors fail to generalize to deepfake content generated by unseen deepfake generators. Finally, we propose future directions to obtain robust and powerful deepfake detectors. Our project page and new benchmark are available at https://github.com/CroitoruAlin/biodeep.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved almost human-like performance on various tasks. While some LLMs have been trained on multilingual data, most of the training data is in English; hence, their performance in English greatly exceeds other languages. To our knowledge, we are the first to collect and translate a large collection of texts, instructions, and benchmarks and train, evaluate, and release open-source LLMs tailored for Romanian. We evaluate our methods on four different categories, including academic benchmarks, MT-Bench (manually translated), and a professionally built historical, cultural, and social benchmark adapted to Romanian. We argue for the usefulness and high performance of RoLLMs by obtaining state-of-the-art results across the board. We publicly release all resources (i.e., data, training and evaluation code, models) to support and encourage research on Romanian LLMs while concurrently creating a generalizable recipe, adequate for other low or less-resourced languages.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved almost human-like performance on various tasks. While some LLMs have been trained on multilingual data, most of the training data is in English. Hence, their performance in English greatly exceeds their performance in other languages. This document presents our approach to training and evaluating the first foundational and chat LLM specialized for Romanian.

We propose an efficient abnormal event detection model based on a lightweight masked auto-encoder (AE) applied at the video frame level. The novelty of the proposed model is threefold. First, we introduce an approach to weight tokens based on motion gradients, thus avoiding learning to reconstruct the static background scene. Second, we integrate a teacher decoder and a student decoder into our architecture, leveraging the discrepancy between the outputs given by the two decoders to improve anomaly detection. Third, we generate synthetic abnormal events to augment the training videos, and task the masked AE model to jointly reconstruct the original frames (without anomalies) and the corresponding pixel-level anomaly maps. Our design leads to an efficient and effective model, as demonstrated by the extensive experiments carried out on three benchmarks: Avenue, ShanghaiTech and UCSD Ped2. The empirical results show that our model achieves an excellent trade-off between speed and accuracy, obtaining competitive AUC scores, while processing 1670 FPS. Hence, our model is between 8 and 70 times faster than competing methods. We also conduct an ablation study to justify our design.

With the growing complexity of deep learning methods adopted in practical applications, there is an increasing and stringent need to explain and interpret the decisions of such methods. In this work, we focus on explainable AI and propose a novel generic and model-agnostic framework for synthesizing input exemplars that maximize a desired response from a machine learning model. To this end, we use a generative model, which acts as a prior for generating data, and traverse its latent space using a novel evolutionary strategy with momentum updates. Our framework is generic because (i) it can employ any underlying generator, e.g. Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) or Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), and (ii) it can be applied to any input data, e.g. images, text samples or tabular data. Since we use a zero-order optimization method, our framework is model-agnostic, in the sense that the machine learning model that we aim to explain is a black-box. We stress out that our novel framework does not require access or knowledge of the internal structure or the training data of the black-box model. We conduct experiments with two generative models, VAEs and GANs, and synthesize exemplars for various data formats, image, text and tabular, demonstrating that our framework is generic. We also employ our prototype synthetization framework on various black-box models, for which we only know the input and the output formats, showing that it is model-agnostic. Moreover, we compare our framework (available at https://github.com/antoniobarbalau/exemplar) with a model-dependent approach based on gradient descent, proving that our framework obtains equally-good exemplars in a shorter computational time.

While previous approaches explore the effect of self-supervision on natural images, we show that patch-based pre-training performs poorly on document images because of their different structural properties and poor intra-sample semantic information. We propose two context-aware alternatives to improve performance on the Tobacco-3482 image classification task. We also propose a novel method for self-supervision, which makes use of the inherent multi-modality of documents (image and text), which performs better than other popular self-supervised methods, including supervised ImageNet pre-training, on document image classification scenarios with a limited amount of data.

The ICML 2013 Workshop on Challenges in Representation Learning focused on three challenges: the black box learning challenge, the facial expression recognition challenge, and the multimodal learning challenge. We describe the datasets created for these challenges and summarize the results of the competitions. We provide suggestions for organizers of future challenges and some comments on what kind of knowledge can be gained from machine learning competitions.