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Aidan Boyd

Aidan Boyd contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

10 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Code World Model Preparedness Report

This report documents the preparedness assessment of Code World Model (CWM), a model for code generation and reasoning about code from Meta. We conducted pre-release testing across domains identified in our Frontier AI Framework as potentially presenting catastrophic risks, and also evaluated the model's misaligned propensities. Our assessment found that CWM does not pose additional frontier risks beyond those present in the current AI ecosystem. We therefore release it as an open-weight model.

preprint2022arXiv

CYBORG: Blending Human Saliency Into the Loss Improves Deep Learning

Can deep learning models achieve greater generalization if their training is guided by reference to human perceptual abilities? And how can we implement this in a practical manner? This paper proposes a training strategy to ConveY Brain Oversight to Raise Generalization (CYBORG). This new approach incorporates human-annotated saliency maps into a loss function that guides the model's learning to focus on image regions that humans deem salient for the task. The Class Activation Mapping (CAM) mechanism is used to probe the model's current saliency in each training batch, juxtapose this model saliency with human saliency, and penalize large differences. Results on the task of synthetic face detection, selected to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach, show that CYBORG leads to significant improvement in accuracy on unseen samples consisting of face images generated from six Generative Adversarial Networks across multiple classification network architectures. We also show that scaling to even seven times the training data, or using non-human-saliency auxiliary information, such as segmentation masks, and standard loss cannot beat the performance of CYBORG-trained models. As a side effect of this work, we observe that the addition of explicit region annotation to the task of synthetic face detection increased human classification accuracy. This work opens a new area of research on how to incorporate human visual saliency into loss functions in practice. All data, code and pre-trained models used in this work are offered with this paper.

preprint2022arXiv

Human Saliency-Driven Patch-based Matching for Interpretable Post-mortem Iris Recognition

Forensic iris recognition, as opposed to live iris recognition, is an emerging research area that leverages the discriminative power of iris biometrics to aid human examiners in their efforts to identify deceased persons. As a machine learning-based technique in a predominantly human-controlled task, forensic recognition serves as "back-up" to human expertise in the task of post-mortem identification. As such, the machine learning model must be (a) interpretable, and (b) post-mortem-specific, to account for changes in decaying eye tissue. In this work, we propose a method that satisfies both requirements, and that approaches the creation of a post-mortem-specific feature extractor in a novel way employing human perception. We first train a deep learning-based feature detector on post-mortem iris images, using annotations of image regions highlighted by humans as salient for their decision making. In effect, the method learns interpretable features directly from humans, rather than purely data-driven features. Second, regional iris codes (again, with human-driven filtering kernels) are used to pair detected iris patches, which are translated into pairwise, patch-based comparison scores. In this way, our method presents human examiners with human-understandable visual cues in order to justify the identification decision and corresponding confidence score. When tested on a dataset of post-mortem iris images collected from 259 deceased subjects, the proposed method places among the three best iris matchers, demonstrating better results than the commercial (non-human-interpretable) VeriEye approach. We propose a unique post-mortem iris recognition method trained with human saliency to give fully-interpretable comparison outcomes for use in the context of forensic examination, achieving state-of-the-art recognition performance.

preprint2022arXiv

State Of The Art In Open-Set Iris Presentation Attack Detection

Research in presentation attack detection (PAD) for iris recognition has largely moved beyond evaluation in "closed-set" scenarios, to emphasize ability to generalize to presentation attack types not present in the training data. This paper offers several contributions to understand and extend the state-of-the-art in open-set iris PAD. First, it describes the most authoritative evaluation to date of iris PAD. We have curated the largest publicly-available image dataset for this problem, drawing from 26 benchmarks previously released by various groups, and adding 150,000 images being released with the journal version of this paper, to create a set of 450,000 images representing authentic iris and seven types of presentation attack instrument (PAI). We formulate a leave-one-PAI-out evaluation protocol, and show that even the best algorithms in the closed-set evaluations exhibit catastrophic failures on multiple attack types in the open-set scenario. This includes algorithms performing well in the most recent LivDet-Iris 2020 competition, which may come from the fact that the LivDet-Iris protocol emphasizes sequestered images rather than unseen attack types. Second, we evaluate the accuracy of five open-source iris presentation attack algorithms available today, one of which is newly-proposed in this paper, and build an ensemble method that beats the winner of the LivDet-Iris 2020 by a substantial margin. This paper demonstrates that closed-set iris PAD, when all PAIs are known during training, is a solved problem, with multiple algorithms showing very high accuracy, while open-set iris PAD, when evaluated correctly, is far from being solved. The newly-created dataset, new open-source algorithms, and evaluation protocol, made publicly available with the journal version of this paper, provide the experimental artifacts that researchers can use to measure progress on this important problem.

preprint2022arXiv

The Value of AI Guidance in Human Examination of Synthetically-Generated Faces

Face image synthesis has progressed beyond the point at which humans can effectively distinguish authentic faces from synthetically generated ones. Recently developed synthetic face image detectors boast "better-than-human" discriminative ability, especially those guided by human perceptual intelligence during the model's training process. In this paper, we investigate whether these human-guided synthetic face detectors can assist non-expert human operators in the task of synthetic image detection when compared to models trained without human-guidance. We conducted a large-scale experiment with more than 1,560 subjects classifying whether an image shows an authentic or synthetically-generated face, and annotate regions that supported their decisions. In total, 56,015 annotations across 3,780 unique face images were collected. All subjects first examined samples without any AI support, followed by samples given (a) the AI's decision ("synthetic" or "authentic"), (b) class activation maps illustrating where the model deems salient for its decision, or (c) both the AI's decision and AI's saliency map. Synthetic faces were generated with six modern Generative Adversarial Networks. Interesting observations from this experiment include: (1) models trained with human-guidance offer better support to human examination of face images when compared to models trained traditionally using cross-entropy loss, (2) binary decisions presented to humans offers better support than saliency maps, (3) understanding the AI's accuracy helps humans to increase trust in a given model and thus increase their overall accuracy. This work demonstrates that although humans supported by machines achieve better-than-random accuracy of synthetic face detection, the ways of supplying humans with AI support and of building trust are key factors determining high effectiveness of the human-AI tandem.

preprint2021arXiv

Interpretable Deep Learning-Based Forensic Iris Segmentation and Recognition

Iris recognition of living individuals is a mature biometric modality that has been adopted globally from governmental ID programs, border crossing, voter registration and de-duplication, to unlocking mobile phones. On the other hand, the possibility of recognizing deceased subjects with their iris patterns has emerged recently. In this paper, we present an end-to-end deep learning-based method for postmortem iris segmentation and recognition with a special visualization technique intended to support forensic human examiners in their efforts. The proposed postmortem iris segmentation approach outperforms the state of the art and in addition to iris annulus, as in case of classical iris segmentation methods - detects abnormal regions caused by eye decomposition processes, such as furrows or irregular specular highlights present on the drying and wrinkling cornea. The method was trained and validated with data acquired from 171 cadavers, kept in mortuary conditions, and tested on subject-disjoint data acquired from 259 deceased subjects. To our knowledge, this is the largest corpus of data used in postmortem iris recognition research to date. The source code of the proposed method are offered with the paper. The test data will be available through the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) archives.

preprint2020arXiv

Are Gabor Kernels Optimal for Iris Recognition?

Gabor kernels are widely accepted as dominant filters for iris recognition. In this work we investigate, given the current interest in neural networks, if Gabor kernels are the only family of functions performing best in iris recognition, or if better filters can be learned directly from iris data. We use (on purpose) a single-layer convolutional neural network as it mimics an iris code-based algorithm. We learn two sets of data-driven kernels; one starting from randomly initialized weights and the other from open-source set of Gabor kernels. Through experimentation, we show that the network does not converge on Gabor kernels, instead converging on a mix of edge detectors, blob detectors and simple waves. In our experiments carried out with three subject-disjoint datasets we found that the performance of these learned kernels is comparable to the open-source Gabor kernels. These lead us to two conclusions: (a) a family of functions offering optimal performance in iris recognition is wider than Gabor kernels, and (b) we probably hit the maximum performance for an iris coding algorithm that uses a single convolutional layer, yet with multiple filters. Released with this work is a framework to learn data-driven kernels that can be easily transplanted into open-source iris recognition software (for instance, OSIRIS -- Open Source IRIS).

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Learning-Based Feature Extraction in Iris Recognition: Use Existing Models, Fine-tune or Train From Scratch?

Modern deep learning techniques can be employed to generate effective feature extractors for the task of iris recognition. The question arises: should we train such structures from scratch on a relatively large iris image dataset, or it is better to fine-tune the existing models to adapt them to a new domain? In this work we explore five different sets of weights for the popular ResNet-50 architecture to find out whether iris-specific feature extractors perform better than models trained for non-iris tasks. Features are extracted from each convolutional layer and the classification accuracy achieved by a Support Vector Machine is measured on a dataset that is disjoint from the samples used in training of the ResNet-50 model. We show that the optimal training strategy is to fine-tune an off-the-shelf set of weights to the iris recognition domain. This approach results in greater accuracy than both off-the-shelf weights and a model trained from scratch. The winning, fine-tuned approach also shows an increase in performance when compared to previous work, in which only off-the-shelf (not fine-tuned) models were used in iris feature extraction. We make the best-performing ResNet-50 model, fine-tuned with more than 360,000 iris images, publicly available along with this paper.

preprint2020arXiv

Iris Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet-Iris) -- The 2020 Edition

Launched in 2013, LivDet-Iris is an international competition series open to academia and industry with the aim to assess and report advances in iris Presentation Attack Detection (PAD). This paper presents results from the fourth competition of the series: LivDet-Iris 2020. This year's competition introduced several novel elements: (a) incorporated new types of attacks (samples displayed on a screen, cadaver eyes and prosthetic eyes), (b) initiated LivDet-Iris as an on-going effort, with a testing protocol available now to everyone via the Biometrics Evaluation and Testing (BEAT)(https://www.idiap.ch/software/beat/) open-source platform to facilitate reproducibility and benchmarking of new algorithms continuously, and (c) performance comparison of the submitted entries with three baseline methods (offered by the University of Notre Dame and Michigan State University), and three open-source iris PAD methods available in the public domain. The best performing entry to the competition reported a weighted average APCER of 59.10\% and a BPCER of 0.46\% over all five attack types. This paper serves as the latest evaluation of iris PAD on a large spectrum of presentation attack instruments.

preprint2020arXiv

Iris Presentation Attack Detection: Where Are We Now?

As the popularity of iris recognition systems increases, the importance of effective security measures against presentation attacks becomes paramount. This work presents an overview of the most important advances in the area of iris presentation attack detection published in recent two years. Newly-released, publicly-available datasets for development and evaluation of iris presentation attack detection are discussed. Recent literature can be seen to be broken into three categories: traditional "hand-crafted" feature extraction and classification, deep learning-based solutions, and hybrid approaches fusing both methodologies. Conclusions of modern approaches underscore the difficulty of this task. Finally, commentary on possible directions for future research is provided.