Papers for

content moderation platforms

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

New method improves watermark detection in language model outputs

Predictive Likelihood Ratios for Language Model Watermark Detection

Abstract: Keyed watermark detection tests dependence between observed tokens and pseudorandom variables reconstructed from a secret key. Building on the pivotal framework of Li et al. (2025), we construct predictive likelihood ratios that average over uncertain probability deficits and residual-tail distributions. The aim is robust detection power across alternative specifications without requiring a single signal-strength tuning. A mixture prior combines tail shape and effective width; hierarchical extensions allow within-document variation in deficit or width. The test maximizes prior-averaged power at a fixed size, but is not generally uniformly most powerful or minimax. Under the exact conditional pivot null, normalized predictive alternatives selected before each observation yield a Bayes factor that is also a test martingale: Type I error control is unaffected by alternative misspecification and remains valid under optional stopping. This guarantee does not cover violations of the conditional null, and the interpolated implementation has no certified anytime guarantee. Gumbel marginal likelihoods are evaluated by fixed quadrature. Across the evaluated tail-shape and tail-width alternatives and three horizons, the union-tail mixture has maximum observed Type II error regret .0080, compared with .0962 for the equal-tail mixture, relative to the best tested rule. On temperature-matched outputs from two open models, it improves AUC over the equal-tail baseline in all eight non-saturated model-temperature cells, although the leading reference score generally has higher AUC. Supplementary experiments show retained power under independent null-like replacement and smaller changes from hierarchical dependence modeling. The evidence supports robustness across the evaluated alternatives, not uniform power guarantees or resistance to arbitrary text edits.

Mon 14 SeptArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Detecting hidden watermarks in text generated by AI language models can be tricky, especially when details about the watermark are uncertain. The authors developed a new approach that combines multiple assumptions about these uncertainties to better detect watermarks without needing exact tuning. Their method controls false alarms even when tests are stopped early and works well across different scenarios. Although it’s not perfect in all cases, tests show it generally improves accuracy over previous methods.
Open 2609.15657v1

WAVIE improves deepfake detection by combining spatial and frequency cues

Lightweight Generalized DeepFake Face Detection with WAVIE: Wavelet Augmented Vision Intermediate Embeddings

Abstract: Deepfake detection systems often exhibit significant performance degradation when deployed on unseen manipulation methods, limiting their reliability in real-world multimedia environments. This lack of generalization poses critical challenges for misinformation mitigation, digital forensics, and human-centric AI systems. Existing detectors perform well on the forgery methods they are trained on, but their accuracy drops sharply on unseen pipelines. To bridge this generalization gap, we propose WAVIE (Wavelet Augmented Vision Intermediate Embeddings), an end-to-end architecture that combines complementary spatial and frequency cues on top of a frozen CLIP backbone. WAVIE projects intermediate transformer embeddings through a lightweight learnable module, applies a three-level Daubechies-6 (db6) discrete wavelet transform (DWT), refines the low-frequency branch while preserving the high-frequency branch, reconstructs the feature via inverse DWT, and performs classification. Trained only on FaceForensics++, WAVIE achieves AUROC = 0.852 on Celeb-DF-v1, 0.852 on Celeb-DF-v2 and 0.831 on WildDeepFake (WDF) at the frame level, outperforming several state-of-the-art generalization baselines. Extensive ablation studies confirm the importance of both the wavelet module and the intermediate-feature aggregation for cross-dataset performance, highlighting the necessity of jointly leveraging spatial and frequency domains. These results position WAVIE as a strong baseline for deepfake detection in the wild.

Sun 13 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Detecting fake videos called deepfakes is hard because systems often fail when they see new types of fakes they weren’t trained on. The authors present WAVIE, a new method that looks at video images using both their visual details and hidden frequency patterns. By using a special wavelet transformation on features extracted from a powerful image model, WAVIE better spots fake videos it hasn’t seen before. It works well on several challenging test sets, showing promise for more reliable deepfake detection.
Open 2609.14437v1