Xiaohui Cui

Ya-nan Guan, Shaonan Zhang, Hang Guo et al.

In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the NTIRE 2026 3rd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) challenge, with a specific focus on Track 3: AI Flash Portrait. Despite significant advancements in deep learning for image restoration, existing models still encounter substantial challenges in real-world low-light portrait scenarios. Specifically, they struggle to achieve an optimal balance among noise suppression, detail preservation, and faithful illumination and color reproduction. To bridge this gap, this challenge aims to establish a novel benchmark for real-world low-light portrait restoration. We comprehensively evaluate the proposed algorithms utilizing a hybrid evaluation system that integrates objective quantitative metrics with rigorous subjective assessment protocols. For this competition, we provide a dataset containing 800 groups of real-captured low-light portrait data. Each group consists of a 1K-resolution low-light input image, a 1K ground truth (GT), and a 1K person mask. This challenge has garnered widespread attention from both academia and industry, attracting over 100 participating teams and receiving more than 3,000 valid submissions. This report details the motivation behind the challenge, the dataset construction process, the evaluation metrics, and the various phases of the competition. The released dataset and baseline code for this track are publicly available from the same \href{https://github.com/zsn1434/AI_Flash-BaseLine/tree/main}{GitHub repository}, and the official challenge webpage is hosted on \href{https://www.codabench.org/competitions/12885/}{CodaBench}.

Elham Shammar, Xiaohui Cui, Mohammed A. A. Al-qaness

Deep learning models have raised privacy and security concerns due to their reliance on large datasets on central servers. As the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices increases, artificial intelligence (AI) will be crucial for resource management, data processing, and knowledge acquisition. To address those issues, federated learning (FL) has introduced a novel approach to building a versatile, large-scale machine learning framework that operates in a decentralized and hardware-agnostic manner. However, FL faces network bandwidth limitations and data breaches. To reduce the central dependency in FL and increase scalability, swarm learning (SL) has been proposed in collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). SL represents a decentralized machine learning framework that leverages blockchain technology for secure, scalable, and private data management. A blockchain-based network enables the exchange and aggregation of model parameters among participants, thus mitigating the risk of a single point of failure and eliminating communication bottlenecks. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first to introduce the principles of Swarm Learning, its architectural design, and its fields of application. In addition, it highlights numerous research avenues that require further exploration by academic and industry communities to unlock the full potential and applications of SL.

Kun Zhao, Bohao Yang, Chenghua Lin et al.

The long-standing one-to-many issue of the open-domain dialogues poses significant challenges for automatic evaluation methods, i.e., there may be multiple suitable responses which differ in semantics for a given conversational context. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel learning-based automatic evaluation metric (CMN), which can robustly evaluate open-domain dialogues by augmenting Conditional Variational Autoencoders (CVAEs) with a Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) objective and employing Mutual Information (MI) to model the semantic similarity of text in the latent space. Experimental results on two open-domain dialogue datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with a wide range of baselines, especially in handling responses which are distant to the golden reference responses in semantics.

Gaojian Wang, Qian Jiang, Xin Jin et al.

As the remarkable development of facial manipulation technologies is accompanied by severe security concerns, face forgery detection has become a recent research hotspot. Most existing detection methods train a binary classifier under global supervision to judge real or fake. However, advanced manipulations only perform small-scale tampering, posing challenges to comprehensively capture subtle and local forgery artifacts, especially in high compression settings and cross-dataset scenarios. To address such limitations, we propose a novel framework named Multi-modal Contrastive Classification by Locally Correlated Representations(MC-LCR), for effective face forgery detection. Instead of specific appearance features, our MC-LCR aims to amplify implicit local discrepancies between authentic and forged faces from both spatial and frequency domains. Specifically, we design the shallow style representation block that measures the pairwise correlation of shallow feature maps, which encodes local style information to extract more discriminative features in the spatial domain. Moreover, we make a key observation that subtle forgery artifacts can be further exposed in the patch-wise phase and amplitude spectrum and exhibit different clues. According to the complementarity of amplitude and phase information, we develop a patch-wise amplitude and phase dual attention module to capture locally correlated inconsistencies with each other in the frequency domain. Besides the above two modules, we further introduce the collaboration of supervised contrastive loss with cross-entropy loss. It helps the network learn more discriminative and generalized representations. Through extensive experiments and comprehensive studies, we achieve state-of-the-art performance and demonstrate the robustness and generalization of our method.

Adnan Iftekhar, Xiaohui Cui

Automated and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasing daily. As the number of IoT devices grows, the volume of data generated by them will also grow. Managing these rapidly expanding IoT devices and enormous data efficiently to be available to all authorized users without compromising its integrity will become essential in the near future. On the other side, many information security incidents have been recorded, increasing the requirement for countermeasures. While safeguards against hostile third parties have been commonplace until now, operators and parties have seen an increase in demand for data falsification detection and blocking. Blockchain technology is well-known for its privacy, immutability, and decentralized nature. Single-board computers are becoming more powerful while also becoming more affordable as IoT platforms. These single-board computers are gaining traction in the automation industry. This study focuses on a paradigm of IoT-Blockchain integration where the blockchain node runs autonomously on the IoT platform itself. It enables the system to conduct machine-to-machine transactions without the intervention of a person and to exert direct access control over IoT devices. This paper assumed that the readers are familiar with Hyperledger Fabric basic operations and focus on the practical approach of integration. A basic introduction is provided for the newbie on the blockchain.

Gaojian Wang, Qian Jiang, Xin Jin et al.

The internet is filled with fake face images and videos synthesized by deep generative models. These realistic DeepFakes pose a challenge to determine the authenticity of multimedia content. As countermeasures, artifact-based detection methods suffer from insufficiently fine-grained features that lead to limited detection performance. DNN-based detection methods are not efficient enough, given that a DeepFake can be created easily by mobile apps and DNN-based models require high computational resources. For the first time, we show that DeepFake faces have fewer feature points than real ones, especially in certain facial regions. Inspired by feature point detector-descriptors to extract discriminative features at the pixel level, we propose the Fused Facial Region_Feature Descriptor (FFR_FD) for effective and fast DeepFake detection. FFR_FD is only a vector extracted from the face, and it can be constructed from any feature point detector-descriptors. We train a random forest classifier with FFR_FD and conduct extensive experiments on six large-scale DeepFake datasets, whose results demonstrate that our method is superior to most state of the art DNN-based models.

Mir Hassan, Chen Jincai, Adnan Iftekhar et al.

Data Loss/Leakage Prevention (DLP) continues to be the main issue for many large organizations. There are multiple numbers of emerging security attach scenarios and a limitless number of overcoming solutions. Today's enterprises' major concern is to protect confidential information because a leakage that compromises confidential data means that sensitive information is in competitors' hands. Different data types need to be protected. However, our research is focused only on data in motion (DIM) i-e data transferred through the network. The research and scenarios in this paper demonstrate a recent survey on information and data leakage incidents, which reveals its importance and also proposed a model solution that will offer the combination of previous methodologies with a new way of pattern matching by advanced content checker based on the use of machine learning to protect data within an organization and then take actions accordingly. This paper also proposed a DLP deployment design on the gateway level that shows how data is moving through intermediate channels before reaching the final destination using the squid proxy server and ICAP server.