It's birthday party time round Dominic Vella's house.

Tue, 03 Jun 2025
12:30

On the Limits of PAC Learning Opinion Dynamics

Luisa Estrada-Plata, University of Warwick
Abstract

Agents in social networks with threshold-based dynamics change opinions when influenced by sufficiently many peers. Existing literature typically assumes that the network structure and dynamics are fully known, which is often unrealistic. In this work, we ask how to learn a network structure from samples of the agents' synchronous opinion updates. Firstly, if the opinion dynamics follow a threshold rule where a fixed number of influencers prevent opinion change (e.g., unanimity and quasi-unanimity), we give an efficient PAC learning algorithm provided that the number of influencers per agent is bounded. Secondly, under standard computational complexity assumptions, we prove that if the opinion of agents follows the majority of their influencers, then there is no efficient PAC learning algorithm. We propose a polynomial-time heuristic that successfully learns consistent networks in over 97% of our simulations on random graphs, with no failures for some specified conditions on the numbers of agents and opinion diffusion examples.

Tue, 03 Jun 2025
12:00

DecepTIV: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Robust Detection of T2V and I2V Synthetic Videos

Sotirios Stamnas, University of Warwick
Abstract
The latest advances of generative AI have enabled the creation of synthetic media that are indistinguishable from authentic content. To counteract this, the research community has developed a great number of detectors targeting face-centric deepfake manipulations such as face-swapping, face-reenactment, face editing, and entire face synthesis. However, the detection of the most recent type of synthetic videos, Text-To-Video (T2V) and Image-To-Video (I2V), remains significantly under-researched, largely due to the lack of reliable open-source detection datasets. To address this gap, we introduce DecepTIV, a large-scale fake video detection dataset containing thousands of videos generated by the latest T2V and I2V models. To ensure real-world relevance, DecepTIV features diverse, realistic-looking scenes in contexts where misinformation could pose societal risks. We also include perturbed versions of the videos using common augmentations and distractors, to evaluate detector robustness under typical real-world degradations. In addition, we propose a modular generation pipeline that supports the seamless extension of the dataset with future T2V and I2V models. The pipeline generates synthetic videos conditioned on real video content, which ensures content similarity between real and fake examples. Our findings show that such content similarity is essential for training robust detectors, as models may otherwise overfit to scene semantics rather than learning generalizable forensic artifacts.
Data for A projection method to symmetrize the momentum flux in a vector lattice Boltzmann formulation of hydrodynamics
Dellar, P (01 Jan 2025)
Universality for monotone cellular automata
Balister, P Bollobás, B Morris, R Smith, P Journal of the European Mathematical Society (03 Jun 2025)
A projection method to symmetrize the momentum flux in a vector lattice Boltzmann formulation of hydrodynamics
Dellar, P Physics of Fluids (06 Jun 2025)
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