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  • Pattern Recognition Letters

Pattern Detection in the Activation Space for Identifying Synthesized Content

By: Celia Cintas, Skyler Speakman, Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Victor Akinwande, Edward McFowland III and Komminist Weldemariam
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Abstract

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently achieved unprecedented success in photo-realistic image synthesis from low-dimensional random noise. The ability to synthesize high-quality content at a large scale brings potential risks as the generated samples may lead to misinformation that can create severe social, political, health, and business hazards. We propose SubsetGAN to identify generated content by detecting a subset of anomalous node-activations in the inner layers of pre-trained neural networks. These nodes, as a group, maximize a non-parametric measure of divergence away from the expected distribution of activations created from real data. This enables us to identify synthesized images without prior knowledge of their distribution. SubsetGAN efficiently scores subsets of nodes and returns the group of nodes within the pre-trained classifier that contributed to the maximum score. The classifier can be a general fake classifier trained over samples from multiple sources or the discriminator network from different GANs. Our approach shows consistently higher detection power than existing detection methods across several state-of-the-art GANs (PGGAN, StarGAN, and CycleGAN) and over different proportions of generated content.

Keywords

Subset Scanning; Generative Models; Synthetic Content Detection

Citation

Cintas, Celia, Skyler Speakman, Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Victor Akinwande, Edward McFowland III, and Komminist Weldemariam. "Pattern Detection in the Activation Space for Identifying Synthesized Content." Pattern Recognition Letters 153 (January 2022): 207–213.
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About The Author

Edward McFowland III

Technology and Operations Management
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