Ankit Kanaiyalal Prajapati, Shahzad Memon, Mohammed Mahir Rahman, Ameer Al-Nemrat
Centralised biometric identity systems expose users to single points of failure, opaque verification processes, and irreversible biometric compromise. Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) offer stronger privacy guarantees, yet their integration with biometric authentication and distributed verification remains insufficiently explored. This paper presents Ciphera, a decentralised biometric identity framework combining privacy-preserving facial recognition, multi-node verification, IPFS-based credential metadata storage, and blockchain-anchored revocation. Evaluated across functional, performance, security, and distributed consistency dimensions, Ciphera achieved an 81% functional success rate, with stable enrolment and authentication but measurable revocation propagation delays and occasional audit-log inconsistencies. Performance testing demonstrated sub-second p95 verification latency of approximately 820ms under concurrent multi-node conditions. Security analysis confirmed strong confidentiality and integrity guarantees, though incomplete liveness detection leaves susceptibility to deepfake and replay attacks. The results demonstrate the feasibility of decentralised biometric identity while identifying key engineering challenges for production-grade deployment.
The proliferation of AI-generated synthetic media poses a critical threat to the integrity of digital evidence in legal and forensic contexts. Existing deepfake detection systems typically address a single modality and provide no mechanism for tamper-proof evidence preservation. We present DeepFake Forensics AI, a unified platform that detects synthetic media across image, video, and audio modalities, identifies generative architecture fingerprints, and anchors forensic evidence immutably on the Ethereum blockchain. Our system trains four independent neural networks from scratch: an EfficientNet-B4 image detector (AUC = 0.9868), a Bidirectional LSTM video detector (AUC= 0.9628), an ECAPA-TDNN audio detector (EER = 18.63%), and a novel GAN fingerprinting module (accuracy = 99.88%) that identifies the generative architecture behind a fake image. Evidence files are hashed with SHA-256, stored on IPFS via Pinata, and registered on-chain via a Solidity smart contract with role-based access control. The platform provides a React frontend and FastAPI backend suitable for deployment in forensic and legal workflows. To our knowledge, this is the first system to unify multi-modal deepfake detection with blockchain-based chain-of custody management.
Technical traders have long relied on visual analysis of candlestick charts to identify market patterns and predict price movements. While deep learning has achieved remarkable success in image classification, its application to financial chart images remains underexplored. This paper presents a systematic study comparing different visual representations for cryptocurrency regime prediction. We evaluate three image encoding methods (raw candlestick charts, Gramian Angular Fields, and multi-channel GAF), five chart component configurations, four neural network architectures (CNN, ResNet18, EfficientNet-B0, and Vision Transformer), and the impact of ImageNet transfer learning. Through eight controlled experiments on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and S&P 500 data spanning 2018-2024, we identify optimal configurations for visual regime classification. Our results show that a simple 4-layer CNN on raw candlestick charts achieves 0.892 AUC-ROC, outperforming larger pretrained models. Surprisingly, simpler representations (price-only charts, 128x128 resolution) consistently outperform more complex alternatives. We provide interpretability analysis using GradCAM and demonstrate that transfer learning improves performance by 4-16% despite the domain gap between natural images and financial charts.
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on real-time perception systems to understand road environments and ensure safe navigation. However, implementing reliable perception algorithms on resource-constrained embedded platforms remains challenging due to limited computational resources. This paper presents a lightweight vision-based framework that integrates lane detection, lane tracking, and traffic sign recognition for embedded autonomous vehicles. A computationally efficient threshold-based lane segmentation method combined with perspective transformation and histogram-based curvature estimation is used for robust lane tracking under varying illumination conditions. A rule-based steering controller generates steering commands to maintain stable vehicle navigation. For traffic sign recognition, two lightweight convolutional neural networks (CNNs), EfficientNet-B0 and MobileNetV2, are evaluated using a custom dataset captured from the vehicle's onboard camera. Experimental results show that the system achieves real-time performance while maintaining accurate lane tracking with only 3.16% maximum offset RMSE. EfficientNet-B0 achieves a high offline classification accuracy of 98.77% on the test dataset, while achieving 90% accuracy during real-time on-device deployment, outperforming MobileNetV2 in both settings. MobileNetV2, however, offers slightly faster inference and lower computational cost. These results highlight the effectiveness of lightweight vision-based perception pipelines for resource-constrained autonomous driving applications.
Accurate forecasting of Bitcoin (BTC) has always been a challenge because decentralized markets are non-linear, highly volatile, and have temporal irregularities. Existing deep learning models often struggle with interpretability and generalization across diverse market conditions. This research presents a hybrid stacked-generalization framework, TFT-ACB-XML, for BTC closing price prediction. The framework integrates two parallel base learners: a customized Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) and an Attention-Customized Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network (ACB), followed by an XGBoost regressor as the meta-learner. The customized TFT model handles long-range dependencies and global temporal dynamics via variable selection networks and interpretable single-head attention. The ACB module uses a new attention mechanism alongside the customized BiLSTM to capture short-term sequential dependencies. Predictions from both customized TFT and ACB are weighted through an error-reciprocal weighting strategy. These weights are derived from validation performance, where a model showing lower prediction error receives a higher weight. Finally, the framework concatenates these weighted outputs into a feature vector and feeds the vector to an XGBoost regressor, which captures non-linear residuals and produces the final BTC closing price prediction. Empirical validation using BTC data from October 1, 2014, to January 5, 2026, shows improved performance of the proposed framework compared to recent Deep Learning and Transformer baseline models. The results show a MAPE of 0.65%, an MAE of 198.15, and an RMSE of 258.30 for one-step-ahead out-of-sample under a walk-forward evaluation on the test block. The evaluation period spans the 2024 BTC halving and the spot ETFs (exchange-traded funds) period, which coincide with major liquidity and volatility shifts.
Consensus mechanisms are the core of any blockchain system. However, the majority of these mechanisms do not target federated learning directly nor do they aid in the aggregation step. This paper introduces Proof of Reasoning (PoR), a novel consensus mechanism specifically designed for federated learning using blockchain, aimed at preserving data privacy, defending against malicious attacks, and enhancing the validation of participating networks. Unlike generic blockchain consensus mechanisms commonly found in the literature, PoR integrates three distinct processes tailored for federated learning. Firstly, a masked autoencoder (MAE) is trained to generate an encoder that functions as a feature map and obfuscates input data, rendering it resistant to human reconstruction and model inversion attacks. Secondly, a downstream classifier is trained at the edge, receiving input from the trained encoder. The downstream network's weights, a single encoded datapoint, the network's output and the ground truth are then added to a block for federated aggregation. Lastly, this data facilitates the aggregation of all participating networks, enabling more complex and verifiable aggregation methods than previously possible. This three-stage process results in more robust networks with significantly reduced computational complexity, maintaining high accuracy by training only the downstream classifier at the edge. PoR scales to large IoT networks with low latency and storage growth, and adapts to evolving data, regulations, and network conditions.
Cryptocurrency trading increasingly depends on timely integration of heterogeneous web information and market microstructure signals to support short-horizon decision making under extreme volatility. However, existing trading systems struggle to jointly reason over noisy multi-source web evidence while maintaining robustness to rapid price shocks at sub-second timescales. The first challenge lies in synthesizing unstructured web content, social sentiment, and structured OHLCV signals into coherent and interpretable trading decisions without amplifying spurious correlations, while the second challenge concerns risk control, as slow deliberative reasoning pipelines are ill-suited for handling abrupt market shocks that require immediate defensive responses. To address these challenges, we propose WebCryptoAgent, an agentic trading framework that decomposes web-informed decision making into modality-specific agents and consolidates their outputs into a unified evidence document for confidence-calibrated reasoning. We further introduce a decoupled control architecture that separates strategic hourly reasoning from a real-time second-level risk model, enabling fast shock detection and protective intervention independent of the trading loop. Extensive experiments on real-world cryptocurrency markets demonstrate that WebCryptoAgent improves trading stability, reduces spurious activity, and enhances tail-risk handling compared to existing baselines. Code will be available at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/WebCryptoAgent.
Md Motaleb Hossen Manik, Md Zabirul Islam, Ge Wang
Modern vision--language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to interpret and generate educational content, yet their semantic outputs remain challenging to verify, reproduce, and audit over time. Inconsistencies across model families, inference settings, and computing environments undermine the reliability of AI-generated instructional material, particularly in high-stakes and quantitative STEM domains. This work introduces SlideChain, a blockchain-backed provenance framework designed to provide verifiable integrity for multimodal semantic extraction at scale. Using the SlideChain Slides Dataset-a curated corpus of 1,117 medical imaging lecture slides from a university course-we extract concepts and relational triples from four state-of-the-art VLMs and construct structured provenance records for every slide. SlideChain anchors cryptographic hashes of these records on a local EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)-compatible blockchain, providing tamper-evident auditability and persistent semantic baselines. Through the first systematic analysis of semantic disagreement, cross-model similarity, and lecture-level variability in multimodal educational content, we reveal pronounced cross-model discrepancies, including low concept overlap and near-zero agreement in relational triples on many slides. We further evaluate gas usage, throughput, and scalability under simulated deployment conditions, and demonstrate perfect tamper detection along with deterministic reproducibility across independent extraction runs. Together, these results show that SlideChain provides a practical and scalable step toward trustworthy, verifiable multimodal educational pipelines, supporting long-term auditability, reproducibility, and integrity for AI-assisted instructional systems.
Medical imaging is essential for clinical diagnosis, yet real-world data frequently suffers from corruption, noise, and potential tampering, challenging the reliability of AI-assisted interpretation. Conventional reconstruction techniques prioritize pixel-level recovery and may produce visually plausible outputs while compromising anatomical fidelity, an issue that can directly impact clinical outcomes. We propose a semantic-aware medical image reconstruction framework that integrates high-level latent embeddings with a hybrid U-Net architecture to preserve clinically relevant structures during restoration. To ensure trust and accountability, we incorporate a lightweight blockchain-based provenance layer using scale-free graph design, enabling verifiable recording of each reconstruction event without imposing significant overhead. Extensive evaluation across multiple datasets and corruption types demonstrates improved structural consistency, restoration accuracy, and provenance integrity compared with existing approaches. By uniting semantic-guided reconstruction with secure traceability, our solution advances dependable AI for medical imaging, enhancing both diagnostic confidence and regulatory compliance in healthcare environments.
A long road trip is fun for drivers. However, a long drive for days can be tedious for a driver to accommodate stringent deadlines to reach distant destinations. Such a scenario forces drivers to drive extra miles, utilizing extra hours daily without sufficient rest and breaks. Once a driver undergoes such a scenario, it occasionally triggers drowsiness during driving. Drowsiness in driving can be life-threatening to any individual and can affect other drivers' safety; therefore, a real-time detection system is needed. To identify fatigued facial characteristics in drivers and trigger the alarm immediately, this research develops a real-time driver drowsiness detection system utilizing deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) and OpenCV.Our proposed and implemented model takes real- time facial images of a driver using a live camera and utilizes a Python-based library named OpenCV to examine the facial images for facial landmarks like sufficient eye openings and yawn-like mouth movements. The DCNNs framework then gathers the data and utilizes a per-trained model to detect the drowsiness of a driver using facial landmarks. If the driver is identified as drowsy, the system issues a continuous alert in real time, embedded in the Smart Car technology.By potentially saving innocent lives on the roadways, the proposed technique offers a non-invasive, inexpensive, and cost-effective way to identify drowsiness. Our proposed and implemented DCNNs embedded drowsiness detection model successfully react with NTHU-DDD dataset and Yawn-Eye-Dataset with drowsiness detection classification accuracy of 99.6% and 97% respectively.
Rapid advancement in generative AI and large language models (LLMs) has enabled the generation of highly realistic and contextually relevant digital content. LLMs such as ChatGPT with DALL-E integration and Stable Diffusion techniques can produce images that are often indistinguishable from those created by humans, which poses challenges for digital content authentication. Verifying the integrity and origin of digital data to ensure it remains unaltered and genuine is crucial to maintaining trust and legality in digital media. In this paper, we propose an embedding-based AI image detection framework that utilizes image embeddings and a vector similarity to distinguish AI-generated images from real (human-created) ones. Our methodology is built on the hypothesis that AI-generated images demonstrate closer embedding proximity to other AI-generated content, while human-created images cluster similarly within their domain. To validate this hypothesis, we developed a system that processes a diverse dataset of AI and human-generated images through five benchmark embedding models. Extensive experimentation demonstrates the robustness of our approach, and our results confirm that moderate to high perturbations minimally impact the embedding signatures, with perturbed images maintaining close similarity matches to their original versions. Our solution provides a generalizable framework for AI-generated image detection that balances accuracy with computational efficiency.
With the rapid adoption of diffusion models for visual content generation, proving authorship and protecting copyright have become critical. This challenge is particularly important when model owners keep their models private and may be unwilling or unable to handle authorship issues, making third-party verification essential. A natural solution is to embed watermarks for later verification. However, existing methods require access to model weights and rely on computationally heavy procedures, rendering them impractical and non-scalable. To address these challenges, we propose NoisePrints, a lightweight watermarking scheme that utilizes the random seed used to initialize the diffusion process as a proof of authorship without modifying the generation process. Our key observation is that the initial noise derived from a seed is highly correlated with the generated visual content. By incorporating a hash function into the noise sampling process, we further ensure that recovering a valid seed from the content is infeasible. We also show that sampling an alternative seed that passes verification is infeasible, and demonstrate the robustness of our method under various manipulations. Finally, we show how to use cryptographic zero-knowledge proofs to prove ownership without revealing the seed. By keeping the seed secret, we increase the difficulty of watermark removal. In our experiments, we validate NoisePrints on multiple state-of-the-art diffusion models for images and videos, demonstrating efficient verification using only the seed and output, without requiring access to model weights.
In this report, we compare the performance of our UltraGroth-based zero-knowledge machine learning framework Bionetta to other tools of similar purpose such as EZKL, Lagrange's deep-prove, or zkml. The results show a significant boost in the proving time for custom-crafted neural networks: they can be proven even on mobile devices, enabling numerous client-side proving applications. While our scheme increases the cost of one-time preprocessing steps, such as circuit compilation and generating trusted setup, our approach is, to the best of our knowledge, the only one that is deployable on the native EVM smart contracts without overwhelming proof size and verification overheads.
Ayan Sar, Sampurna Roy, Tanupriya Choudhury, Ajith Abraham
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models have dramatically advanced deepfake technology, and its threats to digital security, media integrity, and public trust have increased rapidly. This research explored zero-shot deepfake detection, an emerging method even when the models have never seen a particular deepfake variation. In this work, we studied self-supervised learning, transformer-based zero-shot classifier, generative model fingerprinting, and meta-learning techniques that better adapt to the ever-evolving deepfake threat. In addition, we suggested AI-driven prevention strategies that mitigated the underlying generation pipeline of the deepfakes before they occurred. They consisted of adversarial perturbations for creating deepfake generators, digital watermarking for content authenticity verification, real-time AI monitoring for content creation pipelines, and blockchain-based content verification frameworks. Despite these advancements, zero-shot detection and prevention faced critical challenges such as adversarial attacks, scalability constraints, ethical dilemmas, and the absence of standardized evaluation benchmarks. These limitations were addressed by discussing future research directions on explainable AI for deepfake detection, multimodal fusion based on image, audio, and text analysis, quantum AI for enhanced security, and federated learning for privacy-preserving deepfake detection. This further highlighted the need for an integrated defense framework for digital authenticity that utilized zero-shot learning in combination with preventive deepfake mechanisms. Finally, we highlighted the important role of interdisciplinary collaboration between AI researchers, cybersecurity experts, and policymakers to create resilient defenses against the rising tide of deepfake attacks.
Pallavi Zambare, Venkata Nikhil Thanikella, Ying Liu
Pedestrian intention prediction is essential for autonomous driving in complex urban environments. Conventional approaches depend on supervised learning over frame sequences and require extensive retraining to adapt to new scenarios. Here, we introduce BF-PIP (Beyond Frames Pedestrian Intention Prediction), a zero-shot approach built upon Gemini 2.5 Pro. It infers crossing intentions directly from short, continuous video clips enriched with structured JAAD metadata. In contrast to GPT-4V based methods that operate on discrete frames, BF-PIP processes uninterrupted temporal clips. It also incorporates bounding-box annotations and ego-vehicle speed via specialized multimodal prompts. Without any additional training, BF-PIP achieves 73% prediction accuracy, outperforming a GPT-4V baseline by 18 %. These findings illustrate that combining temporal video inputs with contextual cues enhances spatiotemporal perception and improves intent inference under ambiguous conditions. This approach paves the way for agile, retraining-free perception module in intelligent transportation system.
Andreas Plesner, Turlan Kuzhagaliyev, Roger Wattenhofer
Over the past years, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have demonstrated how AI can solve many perception and generation tasks, such as image classification and text writing, yet reasoning remains a challenge. This paper introduces the FLIP dataset, a benchmark for evaluating AI reasoning capabilities based on human verification tasks on the Idena blockchain. FLIP challenges present users with two orderings of 4 images, requiring them to identify the logically coherent one. By emphasizing sequential reasoning, visual storytelling, and common sense, FLIP provides a unique testbed for multimodal AI systems. Our experiments evaluate state-of-the-art models, leveraging both vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs). Results reveal that even the best open-sourced and closed-sourced models achieve maximum accuracies of 75.5% and 77.9%, respectively, in zero-shot settings, compared to human performance of 95.3%. Captioning models aid reasoning models by providing text descriptions of images, yielding better results than when using the raw images directly, 69.6% vs. 75.2% for Gemini 1.5 Pro. Combining the predictions from 15 models in an ensemble increases the accuracy to 85.2%. These findings highlight the limitations of existing reasoning models and the need for robust multimodal benchmarks like FLIP. The full codebase and dataset will be available at https://github.com/aplesner/FLIP-Reasoning-Challenge.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have significantly advanced deep learning, driving breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, medical diagnosis, object detection, and speech recognition. Architectural innovations including 1D, 2D, and 3D convolutional models, dilated and grouped convolutions, depthwise separable convolutions, and attention mechanisms address domain-specific challenges and enhance feature representation and computational efficiency. Structural refinements such as spatial-channel exploitation, multi-path design, and feature-map enhancement contribute to robust hierarchical feature extraction and improved generalization, particularly through transfer learning. Efficient preprocessing strategies, including Fourier transforms, structured transforms, low-precision computation, and weight compression, optimize inference speed and facilitate deployment in resource-constrained environments. This survey presents a unified taxonomy that classifies CNN architectures based on spatial exploitation, multi-path structures, depth, width, dimensionality expansion, channel boosting, and attention mechanisms. It systematically reviews CNN applications in face recognition, pose estimation, action recognition, text classification, statistical language modeling, disease diagnosis, radiological analysis, cryptocurrency sentiment prediction, 1D data processing, video analysis, and speech recognition. In addition to consolidating architectural advancements, the review highlights emerging learning paradigms such as few-shot, zero-shot, weakly supervised, federated learning frameworks and future research directions include hybrid CNN-transformer models, vision-language integration, generative learning, etc. This review provides a comprehensive perspective on CNN's evolution from 2015 to 2025, outlining key innovations, challenges, and opportunities.
Thanh Nam Duong, Trung Kien Hoang, Quoc Khanh Duong, Quoc Dat Dinh · 8 authors
This paper investigates predicting market strength solely from candlestick chart images to assist investment decisions. The core research problem is developing an effective computer vision-based model using raw candlestick visuals without time-series data. We specifically analyze the impact of incorporating candlestick patterns that were detected by YOLOv8. The study implements two approaches: pure CNN on chart images and a Decomposer architecture detecting patterns. Experiments utilize diverse financial datasets spanning stocks, cryptocurrencies, and forex assets. Key findings demonstrate candlestick patterns do not improve model performance over only image data in our research. The significance is illuminating limitations in candlestick image signals. Performance peaked at approximately 0.7 accuracy, below more complex time-series models. Outcomes reveal challenges in distilling sufficient predictive power from visual shapes alone, motivating the incorporation of other data modalities. This research clarifies how purely image-based models can inform trading while confirming patterns add little value over raw charts. Our content is endeavored to be delineated into distinct sections, each autonomously furnishing a unique contribution while maintaining cohesive linkage. Note that, the examples discussed herein are not limited to the scope, applicability, or knowledge outlined in the paper.
Yanming Zhu, Xuefei Yin, Alan Wee‐Chung Liew, Hui Tian
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and deep learning, medical image analysis has become a critical tool in modern healthcare, significantly improving diagnostic accuracy and efficiency. However, AI-based methods also raise serious privacy concerns, as medical images often contain highly sensitive patient information. This review offers a comprehensive overview of privacy-preserving techniques in medical image analysis, including encryption, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, federated learning, and generative adversarial networks. We explore the application of these techniques across various medical image analysis tasks, such as diagnosis, pathology, and telemedicine. Notably, we organizes the review based on specific challenges and their corresponding solutions in different medical image analysis applications, so that technical applications are directly aligned with practical issues, addressing gaps in the current research landscape. Additionally, we discuss emerging trends, such as zero-knowledge proofs and secure multi-party computation, offering insights for future research. This review serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners and can help advance privacy-preserving in medical image analysis.
In modern times, the cryptocurrency market is one of the world's most rapidly rising financial markets. The cryptocurrency market is regarded to be more volatile and illiquid than traditional markets such as equities, foreign exchange, and commodities. The risk of this market creates an uncertain condition among the investors. The purpose of this research is to predict the magnitude of the risk factor of the cryptocurrency market. Risk factor is also called volatility. Our approach will assist people who invest in the cryptocurrency market by overcoming the problems and difficulties they experience. Our approach starts with calculating the risk factor of the cryptocurrency market from the existing parameters. In twenty elements of the cryptocurrency market, the risk factor has been predicted using different machine learning algorithms such as CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM, and GRU. All of the models have been applied to the calculated risk factor parameter. A new model has been developed to predict better than the existing models. Our proposed model gives the highest RMSE value of 1.3229 and the lowest RMSE value of 0.0089. Following our model, it will be easier for investors to trade in complicated and challenging financial assets like bitcoin, Ethereum, dogecoin, etc. Where the other existing models, the highest RMSE was 14.5092, and the lower was 0.02769. So, the proposed model performs much better than models with proper generalization. Using our approach, it will be easier for investors to trade in complicated and challenging financial assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin.
Cassidy Gibson, Daniel Olszewski, Natalie Grace Brigham, Anna Crowder · 8 authors
Given a source image of a clothed person (an image subject), AI-based nudification applications can produce nude (undressed) images of that person. Moreover, not only do such applications exist, but there is ample evidence of the use of such applications in the real world and without the consent of an image subject. Still, despite the growing awareness of the existence of such applications and their potential to violate the rights of image subjects and cause downstream harms, there has been no systematic study of the nudification application ecosystem across multiple applications. We conduct such a study here, focusing on 20 popular and easy-to-find nudification websites. We study the positioning of these web applications (e.g., finding that most sites explicitly target the nudification of women, not all people), the features that they advertise (e.g., ranging from undressing-in-place to the rendering of image subjects in sexual positions, as well as differing user-privacy options), and their underlying monetization infrastructure (e.g., credit cards and cryptocurrencies). We believe this work will empower future, data-informed conversations -- within the scientific, technical, and policy communities -- on how to better protect individuals' rights and minimize harm in the face of modern (and future) AI-based nudification applications. Content warning: This paper includes descriptions of web applications that can be used to create synthetic non-consensual explicit AI-created imagery (SNEACI). This paper also includes an artistic rendering of a user interface for such an application.
Duong H. Nguyen, Phi L. Nguyen, Truong T. Nguyen, Hieu H. Pham · 5 authors
Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning method for training with private data locally stored in distributed machines without gathering them into one place for central learning. Despite its promises, FL is prone to critical security risks. First, because FL depends on a central server to aggregate local training models, this is a single point of failure. The server might function maliciously. Second, due to its distributed nature, FL might encounter backdoor attacks by participating clients. They can poison the local model before submitting to the server. Either type of attack, on the server or the client side, would severely degrade learning accuracy. We propose FedBlock, a novel blockchain-based FL framework that addresses both of these security risks. FedBlock is uniquely desirable in that it involves only smart contract programming, thus deployable atop any blockchain network. Our framework is substantiated with a comprehensive evaluation study using real-world datasets. Its robustness against backdoor attacks is competitive with the literature of FL backdoor defense. The latter, however, does not address the server risk as we do.
The digital art market faces unprecedented challenges in authenticity verification and copyright protection. This study introduces an integrated framework to address these issues by combining neural style transfer, fractal analysis, and blockchain technology. We generate abstract artworks inspired by Jackson Pollock, using their inherent mathematical complexity to create robust, imperceptible watermarks. Our method embeds these watermarks, derived from fractal and turbulence features, directly into the artwork's structure. This approach is then secured by linking the watermark to NFT metadata, ensuring immutable proof of ownership. Rigorous testing shows our feature-based watermarking achieves a 76.2% average detection rate against common attacks, significantly outperforming traditional methods (27.8-44.0%). This work offers a practical solution for digital artists and collectors, enhancing security and trust in the digital art ecosystem.
How AI models should deal with political topics has been discussed, but it remains challenging and requires better governance. This paper examines the governance of large language models through individual and collective deliberation, focusing on politically sensitive videos. We conducted a two-step study: interviews with 10 journalists established a baseline understanding of expert video interpretation; 114 individuals through deliberation using InclusiveAI, a platform that facilitates democratic decision-making through decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) mechanisms. Our findings reveal distinct differences in interpretative priorities: while experts emphasized emotion and narrative, the general public prioritized factual clarity, objectivity, and emotional neutrality. Furthermore, we examined how different governance mechanisms - quadratic vs. weighted voting and equal vs. 20/80 voting power - shape users' decision-making regarding AI behavior. Results indicate that voting methods significantly influence outcomes, with quadratic voting reinforcing perceptions of liberal democracy and political equality. Our study underscores the necessity of selecting appropriate governance mechanisms to better capture user perspectives and suggests decentralized AI governance as a potential way to facilitate broader public engagement in AI development, ensuring that varied perspectives meaningfully inform design decisions.