Vittoria Bruni

Irene Amerini, Mauro Barni, Sebastiano Battiato et al.

AI-generated synthetic media, also called Deepfakes, have significantly influenced so many domains, from entertainment to cybersecurity. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs) are the main frameworks used to create Deepfakes, producing highly realistic yet fabricated content. While these technologies open up new creative possibilities, they also bring substantial ethical and security risks due to their potential misuse. The rise of such advanced media has led to the development of a cognitive bias known as Impostor Bias, where individuals doubt the authenticity of multimedia due to the awareness of AI's capabilities. As a result, Deepfake detection has become a vital area of research, focusing on identifying subtle inconsistencies and artifacts with machine learning techniques, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Research in forensic Deepfake technology encompasses five main areas: detection, attribution and recognition, passive authentication, detection in realistic scenarios, and active authentication. This paper reviews the primary algorithms that address these challenges, examining their advantages, limitations, and future prospects.

Vittoria Bruni, Paola Erminia Calabrese, Rosanna Campagna et al.

This paper explores the use of artificial neural networks for the stable and data-driven selection of the frequency parameter in hyperbolic polynomial penalized splines (HP-splines). This parameter defines the underlying spline space and is essential for adapting the model to exponential patterns in the data, such as those encountered in signal processing. The theoretical approximation properties of deep neural network architectures are investigated to establish a connection between classical spline-based regression and modern data-driven learning methods. Based on this analysis, a neural network is designed to predict optimal HP-spline parameters by balancing approximation accuracy, stability analysis, and complexity control, thereby producing neural architectures that are both expressive and stable. Numerical experiments confirm that the proposed approach achieves both high accuracy and stable performance, validating the theoretical findings.