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Christos Koutlis

Christos Koutlis contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Automated In-the-Wild Data Collection for Continual AI Generated Image Detection

The rapid advancement of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has introduced significant challenges for reliable AI-generated image detection. Existing detectors often suffer from performance degradation under distribution shifts and when encountering newly emerging generative models. In this work, we propose a data-centric continual adaptation framework for updating detectors in evolving environments. We show that both in-the-wild data and generator-driven data are essential for adapting detectors. We introduce an automated, weakly supervised pipeline for constructing in-the-wild datasets through fact-check article retrieval. Additionally, we demonstrate that incorporating even a small amount of generator-driven data during training enables effective adaptation to newly emerging models, while combining it with in-the-wild data within a continual learning framework enables robust adaptation and mitigates catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments on two state-of-the-art detectors show significant improvements of +9.14% and +8% in average accuracy, respectively.

preprint2026arXiv

Latent Reconstruction from Generated Data for Multimodal Misinformation Detection

Multimodal misinformation, such as miscaptioned images, where captions misrepresent an image's origin, context, or meaning, poses a growing challenge in the digital age. Due to the scarcity of large-scale annotated datasets for multimodal misinformation detection (MMD), recent approaches rely on synthetic training data created via out-of-context pairings or named entity manipulations (e.g., altering names, dates, or locations). However, these often yield simplistic, unrealistic examples, which limits their utility as training examples. To address this, we introduce "MisCaption This!", a framework for generating high-fidelity synthetic miscaptioned datasets through Adversarial Prompting of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Additionally, we introduce "Latent Multimodal Reconstruction" (LAMAR), a Transformer-based network trained to reconstruct the embeddings of truthful captions, providing a strong auxiliary signal to guide detection. We explore various training strategies (end-to-end vs. large-scale pre-training) and integration mechanisms (direct, mask, gate, and attention). Extensive experiments show that models trained on "MisCaption This!" data generalize better to real-world misinformation, while LAMAR achieves new state-of-the-art on NewsCLIPpings, VERITE, and the newly introduced VERITE 24/25 benchmark; highlighting the efficacy of VLM-generated data and reconstruction-based networks for advancing MMD. Our code is available at https://github.com/stevejpapad/miscaptioned-image-reconstruction

preprint2023arXiv

MemeTector: Enforcing deep focus for meme detection

Image memes and specifically their widely-known variation image macros, is a special new media type that combines text with images and is used in social media to playfully or subtly express humour, irony, sarcasm and even hate. It is important to accurately retrieve image memes from social media to better capture the cultural and social aspects of online phenomena and detect potential issues (hate-speech, disinformation). Essentially, the background image of an image macro is a regular image easily recognized as such by humans but cumbersome for the machine to do so due to feature map similarity with the complete image macro. Hence, accumulating suitable feature maps in such cases can lead to deep understanding of the notion of image memes. To this end, we propose a methodology, called Visual Part Utilization, that utilizes the visual part of image memes as instances of the regular image class and the initial image memes as instances of the image meme class to force the model to concentrate on the critical parts that characterize an image meme. Additionally, we employ a trainable attention mechanism on top of a standard ViT architecture to enhance the model's ability to focus on these critical parts and make the predictions interpretable. Several training and test scenarios involving web-scraped regular images of controlled text presence are considered for evaluating the model in terms of robustness and accuracy. The findings indicate that light visual part utilization combined with sufficient text presence during training provides the best and most robust model, surpassing state of the art. Source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/mever-team/memetector.

preprint2022arXiv

Multimodal Quasi-AutoRegression: Forecasting the visual popularity of new fashion products

Estimating the preferences of consumers is of utmost importance for the fashion industry as appropriately leveraging this information can be beneficial in terms of profit. Trend detection in fashion is a challenging task due to the fast pace of change in the fashion industry. Moreover, forecasting the visual popularity of new garment designs is even more demanding due to lack of historical data. To this end, we propose MuQAR, a Multimodal Quasi-AutoRegressive deep learning architecture that combines two modules: (1) a multi-modal multi-layer perceptron processing categorical, visual and textual features of the product and (2) a quasi-autoregressive neural network modelling the "target" time series of the product's attributes along with the "exogenous" time series of all other attributes. We utilize computer vision, image classification and image captioning, for automatically extracting visual features and textual descriptions from the images of new products. Product design in fashion is initially expressed visually and these features represent the products' unique characteristics without interfering with the creative process of its designers by requiring additional inputs (e.g manually written texts). We employ the product's target attributes time series as a proxy of temporal popularity patterns, mitigating the lack of historical data, while exogenous time series help capture trends among interrelated attributes. We perform an extensive ablation analysis on two large scale image fashion datasets, Mallzee and SHIFT15m to assess the adequacy of MuQAR and also use the Amazon Reviews: Home and Kitchen dataset to assess generalisability to other domains. A comparative study on the VISUELLE dataset, shows that MuQAR is capable of competing and surpassing the domain's current state of the art by 4.65% and 4.8% in terms of WAPE and MAE respectively.

preprint2022arXiv

VICTOR: Visual Incompatibility Detection with Transformers and Fashion-specific contrastive pre-training

For fashion outfits to be considered aesthetically pleasing, the garments that constitute them need to be compatible in terms of visual aspects, such as style, category and color. Previous works have defined visual compatibility as a binary classification task with items in a garment being considered as fully compatible or fully incompatible. However, this is not applicable to Outfit Maker applications where users create their own outfits and need to know which specific items may be incompatible with the rest of the outfit. To address this, we propose the Visual InCompatibility TransfORmer (VICTOR) that is optimized for two tasks: 1) overall compatibility as regression and 2) the detection of mismatching items and utilize fashion-specific contrastive language-image pre-training for fine tuning computer vision neural networks on fashion imagery. We build upon the Polyvore outfit benchmark to generate partially mismatching outfits, creating a new dataset termed Polyvore-MISFITs, that is used to train VICTOR. A series of ablation and comparative analyses show that the proposed architecture can compete and even surpass the current state-of-the-art on Polyvore datasets while reducing the instance-wise floating operations by 88%, striking a balance between high performance and efficiency. We release our code at https://github.com/stevejpapad/Visual-InCompatibility-Transformer

preprint2020arXiv

LAVARNET: Neural Network Modeling of Causal Variable Relationships for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time series forecasting is of great importance to many scientific disciplines and industrial sectors. The evolution of a multivariate time series depends on the dynamics of its variables and the connectivity network of causal interrelationships among them. Most of the existing time series models do not account for the causal effects among the system's variables and even if they do they rely just on determining the between-variables causality network. Knowing the structure of such a complex network and even more specifically knowing the exact lagged variables that contribute to the underlying process is crucial for the task of multivariate time series forecasting. The latter is a rather unexplored source of information to leverage. In this direction, here a novel neural network-based architecture is proposed, termed LAgged VAriable Representation NETwork (LAVARNET), which intrinsically estimates the importance of lagged variables and combines high dimensional latent representations of them to predict future values of time series. Our model is compared with other baseline and state of the art neural network architectures on one simulated data set and four real data sets from meteorology, music, solar activity, and finance areas. The proposed architecture outperforms the competitive architectures in most of the experiments.

preprint2019arXiv

Evaluation of Granger causality measures for constructing networks from multivariate time series

Granger causality and variants of this concept allow the study of complex dynamical systems as networks constructed from multivariate time series. In this work, a large number of Granger causality measures used to form causality networks from multivariate time series are assessed. These measures are in the time domain, such as model-based and information measures, the frequency domain and the phase domain. The study aims also to compare bivariate and multivariate measures, linear and nonlinear measures, as well as the use of dimension reduction in linear model-based measures and information measures. The latter is particular relevant in the study of high-dimensional time series. For the performance of the multivariate causality measures, low and high dimensional coupled dynamical systems are considered in discrete and continuous time, as well as deterministic and stochastic. The measures are evaluated and ranked according to their ability to provide causality networks that match the original coupling structure. The simulation study concludes that the Granger causality measures using dimension reduction are superior and should be preferred particularly in studies involving many observed variables, such as multi-channel electroencephalograms and financial markets.