Krish Wadhwani

Shihan Cheng, Michael A. Laurenzano, Brian Strauch et al.

Effectively leveraging the vast computational resources of modern cloud environments requires expertise spanning multiple technical domains: configuring scientific software with correct parameters and dependencies, navigating thousands of provider-specific instance types and pricing options, and managing parallel or distributed execution. We conduct a study indicating that the absence of these categories of expertise poses an ongoing challenge to unlocking the potential of cloud-enabled computational science. To address this challenge, we introduce Adviser, an intuitive multi-cloud platform centered on a workflow abstraction. Workflows are reusable, expert-crafted artifacts encapsulating environment setup, data processing, simulation, result capture, and visualization steps needed to execute scientific and ML applications. This approach allows users to specify high-level intent, while Adviser handles resource provisioning, runtime configuration, and data movement. Using two computational glaciology codes, Icepack and PISM, we show how to use Adviser to gain scientific insight and perform rapid exploration of cost-performance tradeoffs and scaling behavior without specialized expertise in cloud or high-performance computing.

Benedikt Hopf, Radu Timofte, Chenfan Qu et al.

Robustness is a long-overlooked problem in deepfake detection. However, detection performance is nearly worthless in the real world if it suffers under exposure to even slight image degradation. In addition to weaker degradations that can accidentally occur in the image processing pipeline, there is another risk of malicious deepfakes that specifically introduce degradations, purposefully exploiting the detector's weaknesses in that regard. Here, we present an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Robust Deepfake Detection Challenge, which specifically addresses that problem. Participants were tasked with building a detector that would later be tested on an unknown test-set, which included both common and uncommon degradations of various strengths. With a total number of 337 participants and 57 submissions to the final leaderboard, the first edition of the challenge was well received. To ensure the reliability of the results, participants were given only 24h to complete the test run with no labels provided, limiting the possibility of training on the test data. Furthermore, the top solutions were scored on a private test-set to detect any such overfitting. This report presents the competition setting, dataset preparation, as well as details and performance of methods. Top methods rely on large foundation models, ensembles, and degradation training to combine generality and robustness.