arXiv subjects

Awais Khan

Publications and source records attributed to Awais Khan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Uncertainty-Aware Deepfake Detection via Multi-View Structural Learning

Security-critical biometric and forensic applications require accurate predictions and reliable confidence estimates, particularly under distribution shift. This challenge is especially acute for deepfake detection, where foundation-model-based detectors often exhibit overconfident predictions on out-of-distribution manipulations, which limits their suitability for operational deployment. We propose an uncertainty-aware deepfake detection framework that identifies manipulations through inconsistencies across complementary evidence sources. The framework integrates three streams: a visual stream based on an adapted CLIP encoder, a semantic stream that models consistency among facial attributes through differentiable constraints, and a structural stream that captures class-dependent dependency patterns between semantic and forensic features. To effectively combine these signals, we introduce Inter-Branch Disagreement Calibration (IBDC), a disagreement-aware uncertainty modeling mechanism that links predictive uncertainty to conflicts among evidence streams. Extensive cross-dataset experiments using FaceForensics++ as the training source demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art generalization across multiple out-of-distribution benchmarks while consistently improving calibration and selective prediction performance. These results show that combining complementary evidence with disagreement-aware uncertainty provides a robust foundation for trustworthy and well-calibrated deepfake detection under distribution shift.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Do Transformations Reveal the Truth? Generative Residual Learning for Generalized AI-Generated Image Detection

The rapid advancement of generative AI has enabled the creation of highly realistic deepfake media, posing significant threats, including misinformation, digital identity theft, fraud, and manipulation of public opinion. AI-generated image (AIGI) detection is reliably challenging due to the diversity of generative methods and the subtle artifacts they leave behind. In this work, we propose GenRes, a novel framework for generative residual learning via a neural tensor network, which models fine-grained relational features between original and transformed samples to enhance generalization. To address scenarios involving multiple generative transformations, we introduce GenRes++, which employs a learnable attention mechanism to aggregate relational features across multiple transformed samples and enables the model to focus on the most informative cues. Both models leverage PE-Core as a feature extractor, providing generalized and semantically rich embeddings that improve cross-domain performance and enable the detection of AIGI generated by unseen methods. Comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed GenRes++ approach outperforms existing methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Dual-Branch Gated Fusion for Open-Set Audio Deepfake Source Tracing

Attributing a synthetic utterance to its originating system remains an open challenge: closed-set models fail to reject unseen synthesizers and produce overconfident predictions. To address this, we propose a dual-branch gated fusion framework that pairs XLSR-53 with CORES, a 66-dimensional descriptor that, unlike prior Linear Filter Bank (LFB)-only work, spans cepstral, oscillatory, rhythmic, energy, and spectral dimensions to capture complementary synthesis artifacts. Our analysis shows XLSR-53 remains discriminative in-domain (ID) while CORES generalizes stably under distribution shift (OOD), yet their naive concatenation fails due to SSL representational imbalance. To resolve this, an input-conditioned gate adaptively weights each branch under joint training with cross-entropy, an energy margin loss for ID/OOD separation, and a gate diversity term. On the MLAAD benchmark, our system achieves 97.6\% ID accuracy, 4.9\% EERc, and an 83.5\% relative FPR95 reduction over the Interspeech 2025 baseline.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

Instruction-Tuned LLMs for Parsing and Mining Unstructured Logs on Leadership HPC Systems

Leadership-class HPC systems generate massive volumes of heterogeneous, largely unstructured system logs. Because these logs originate from diverse software, hardware, and runtime layers, they exhibit inconsistent formats, making structure extraction and pattern discovery extremely challenging. Therefore, robust log parsing and mining is critical to transform this raw telemetry into actionable insights that reveal operational patterns, diagnose anomalies, and enable reliable, efficient, and scalable system analysis. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer a promising new direction for automated log understanding in leadership-class HPC environments. To capitalize on this opportunity, we present a domain-adapted, instruction-following, LLM-driven framework that leverages chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to parse and structure HPC logs with high fidelity. Our approach combines domain-specific log-template data with instruction-tuned examples to fine-tune an 8B-parameter LLaMA model tailored for HPC log analysis. We develop a hybrid fine-tuning methodology that adapts a general-purpose LLM to domain-specific log data, enabling privacy-preserving, locally deployable, fast, and energy-efficient log-mining approach. We conduct experiments on a diverse set of log datasets from the LogHub repository. The evaluation confirms that our approach achieves parsing accuracy on par with significantly larger models, such as LLaMA 70B and Anthropic's Claude. We further validate the practical utility of our fine-tuned LLM model by parsing over 600 million production logs from the Frontier supercomputer over a four-week window, uncovering critical patterns in temporal dynamics, node-level anomalies, and workload-error log correlations.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

TRACE: Training-Free Partial Audio Deepfake Detection via Embedding Trajectory Analysis of Speech Foundation Models

Partial audio deepfakes, where synthesized segments are spliced into genuine recordings, are particularly deceptive because most of the audio remains authentic. Existing detectors are supervised: they require frame-level annotations, overfit to specific synthesis pipelines, and must be retrained as new generative models emerge. We argue that this supervision is unnecessary. We hypothesize that speech foundation models implicitly encode a forensic signal: genuine speech forms smooth, slowly varying embedding trajectories, while splice boundaries introduce abrupt disruptions in frame-level transitions. Building on this, we propose TRACE (Training-free Representation-based Audio Countermeasure via Embedding dynamics), a training-free framework that detects partial audio deepfakes by analyzing the first-order dynamics of frozen speech foundation model representations without any training, labeled data, or architectural modification. We evaluate TRACE on four benchmarks that span two languages using six speech foundation models. In PartialSpoof, TRACE achieves 8.08% EER, competitive with fine-tuned supervised baselines. In LlamaPartialSpoof, the most challenging benchmark featuring LLM-driven commercial synthesis, TRACE surpasses a supervised baseline outright (24.12% vs. 24.49% EER) without any target-domain data. These results show that temporal dynamics in speech foundation models provide an effective, generalize signal for training-free audio forensics.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

Adversarial Attacks on Audio Deepfake Detection: A Benchmark and Comparative Study

The widespread use of generative AI has shown remarkable success in producing highly realistic deepfakes, posing a serious threat to various voice biometric applications, including speaker verification, voice biometrics, audio conferencing, and criminal investigations. To counteract this, several state-of-the-art (SoTA) audio deepfake detection (ADD) methods have been proposed to identify generative AI signatures to distinguish between real and deepfake audio. However, the effectiveness of these methods is severely undermined by anti-forensic (AF) attacks that conceal generative signatures. These AF attacks span a wide range of techniques, including statistical modifications (e.g., pitch shifting, filtering, noise addition, and quantization) and optimization-based attacks (e.g., FGSM, PGD, C \& W, and DeepFool). In this paper, we investigate the SoTA ADD methods and provide a comparative analysis to highlight their effectiveness in exposing deepfake signatures, as well as their vulnerabilities under adversarial conditions. We conducted an extensive evaluation of ADD methods on five deepfake benchmark datasets using two categories: raw and spectrogram-based approaches. This comparative analysis enables a deeper understanding of the strengths and limitations of SoTA ADD methods against diverse AF attacks. It does not only highlight vulnerabilities of ADD methods, but also informs the design of more robust and generalized detectors for real-world voice biometrics. It will further guide future research in developing adaptive defense strategies that can effectively counter evolving AF techniques.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

SHIELD: A Secure and Highly Enhanced Integrated Learning for Robust Deepfake Detection against Adversarial Attacks

Audio plays a crucial role in applications like speaker verification, voice-enabled smart devices, and audio conferencing. However, audio manipulations, such as deepfakes, pose significant risks by enabling the spread of misinformation. Our empirical analysis reveals that existing methods for detecting deepfake audio are often vulnerable to anti-forensic (AF) attacks, particularly those attacked using generative adversarial networks. In this article, we propose a novel collaborative learning method called SHIELD to defend against generative AF attacks. To expose AF signatures, we integrate an auxiliary generative model, called the defense (DF) generative model, which facilitates collaborative learning by combining input and output. Furthermore, we design a triplet model to capture correlations for real and AF attacked audios with real-generated and attacked-generated audios using auxiliary generative models. The proposed SHIELD strengthens the defense against generative AF attacks and achieves robust performance across various generative models. The proposed AF significantly reduces the average detection accuracy from 95.49% to 59.77% for ASVspoof2019, from 99.44% to 38.45% for In-the-Wild, and from 98.41% to 51.18% for HalfTruth for three different generative models. The proposed SHIELD mechanism is robust against AF attacks and achieves an average accuracy of 98.13%, 98.58%, and 99.57% in match, and 98.78%, 98.62%, and 98.85% in mismatch settings for the ASVspoof2019, In-the-Wild, and HalfTruth datasets, respectively.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Audio Deepfake Detection

Audio deepfakes pose significant threats, including impersonation, fraud, and reputation damage. To address these risks, audio deepfake detection (ADD) techniques have been developed, demonstrating success on benchmarks like ASVspoof2019. However, their resilience against transferable adversarial attacks remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce a transferable GAN-based adversarial attack framework to evaluate the effectiveness of state-of-the-art (SOTA) ADD systems. By leveraging an ensemble of surrogate ADD models and a discriminator, the proposed approach generates transferable adversarial attacks that better reflect real-world scenarios. Unlike previous methods, the proposed framework incorporates a self-supervised audio model to ensure transcription and perceptual integrity, resulting in high-quality adversarial attacks. Experimental results on benchmark dataset reveal that SOTA ADD systems exhibit significant vulnerabilities, with accuracies dropping from 98% to 26%, 92% to 54%, and 94% to 84% in white-box, gray-box, and black-box scenarios, respectively. When tested in other data sets, performance drops of 91% to 46%, and 94% to 67% were observed against the In-the-Wild and WaveFake data sets, respectively. These results highlight the significant vulnerabilities of existing ADD systems and emphasize the need to enhance their robustness against advanced adversarial threats to ensure security and reliability.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

Securing Social Media Against Deepfakes using Identity, Behavioral, and Geometric Signatures

Trust in social media is a growing concern due to its ability to influence significant societal changes. However, this space is increasingly compromised by various types of deepfake multimedia, which undermine the authenticity of shared content. Although substantial efforts have been made to address the challenge of deepfake content, existing detection techniques face a major limitation in generalization: they tend to perform well only on specific types of deepfakes they were trained on.This dependency on recognizing specific deepfake artifacts makes current methods vulnerable when applied to unseen or varied deepfakes, thereby compromising their performance in real-world applications such as social media platforms. To address the generalizability of deepfake detection, there is a need for a holistic approach that can capture a broader range of facial attributes and manipulations beyond isolated artifacts. To address this, we propose a novel deepfake detection framework featuring an effective feature descriptor that integrates Deep identity, Behavioral, and Geometric (DBaG) signatures, along with a classifier named DBaGNet. Specifically, the DBaGNet classifier utilizes the extracted DBaG signatures, leveraging a triplet loss objective to enhance generalized representation learning for improved classification. Specifically, the DBaGNet classifier utilizes the extracted DBaG signatures and applies a triplet loss objective to enhance generalized representation learning for improved classification. To test the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments using six benchmark deepfake datasets: WLDR, CelebDF, DFDC, FaceForensics++, DFD, and NVFAIR. Specifically, to ensure the effectiveness of our approach, we perform cross-dataset evaluations, and the results demonstrate significant performance gains over several state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Parallel Stacked Aggregated Network for Voice Authentication in IoT-Enabled Smart Devices

Voice authentication on IoT-enabled smart devices has gained prominence in recent years due to increasing concerns over user privacy and security. The current authentication systems are vulnerable to different voice-spoofing attacks (e.g., replay, voice cloning, and audio deepfakes) that mimic legitimate voices to deceive authentication systems and enable fraudulent activities (e.g., impersonation, unauthorized access, financial fraud, etc.). Existing solutions are often designed to tackle a single type of attack, leading to compromised performance against unseen attacks. On the other hand, existing unified voice anti-spoofing solutions, not designed specifically for IoT, possess complex architectures and thus cannot be deployed on IoT-enabled smart devices. Additionally, most of these unified solutions exhibit significant performance issues, including higher equal error rates or lower accuracy for specific attacks. To overcome these issues, we present the parallel stacked aggregation network (PSA-Net), a lightweight framework designed as an anti-spoofing defense system for voice-controlled smart IoT devices. The PSA-Net processes raw audios directly and eliminates the need for dataset-dependent handcrafted features or pre-computed spectrograms. Furthermore, PSA-Net employs a split-transform-aggregate approach, which involves the segmentation of utterances, the extraction of intrinsic differentiable embeddings through convolutions, and the aggregation of them to distinguish legitimate from spoofed audios. In contrast to existing deep Resnet-oriented solutions, we incorporate cardinality as an additional dimension in our network, which enhances the PSA-Net ability to generalize across diverse attacks. The results show that the PSA-Net achieves more consistent performance for different attacks that exist in current anti-spoofing solutions.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

DeepVM: Integrating Spot and On-Demand VMs for Cost-Efficient Deep Learning Clusters in the Cloud

Distributed Deep Learning (DDL), as a paradigm, dictates the use of GPU-based clusters as the optimal infrastructure for training large-scale Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, the high cost of such resources makes them inaccessible to many users. Public cloud services, particularly Spot Virtual Machines (VMs), offer a cost-effective alternative, but their unpredictable availability poses a significant challenge to the crucial checkpointing process in DDL. To address this, we introduce DeepVM, a novel solution that recommends cost-effective cluster configurations by intelligently balancing the use of Spot and On-Demand VMs. DeepVM leverages a four-stage process that analyzes instance performance using the FLOPP (FLoating-point Operations Per Price) metric, performs architecture-level analysis with linear programming, and identifies the optimal configuration for the user-specific needs. Extensive simulations and real-world deployments in the AWS environment demonstrate that DeepVM consistently outperforms other policies, reducing training costs and overall makespan. By enabling cost-effective checkpointing with Spot VMs, DeepVM opens up DDL to a wider range of users and facilitates a more efficient training of complex DNNs.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2023

Securing Voice Biometrics: One-Shot Learning Approach for Audio Deepfake Detection

The Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) system is vulnerable to fraudulent activities using audio deepfakes, also known as logical-access voice spoofing attacks. These deepfakes pose a concerning threat to voice biometrics due to recent advancements in generative AI and speech synthesis technologies. While several deep learning models for speech synthesis detection have been developed, most of them show poor generalizability, especially when the attacks have different statistical distributions from the ones seen. Therefore, this paper presents Quick-SpoofNet, an approach for detecting both seen and unseen synthetic attacks in the ASV system using one-shot learning and metric learning techniques. By using the effective spectral feature set, the proposed method extracts compact and representative temporal embeddings from the voice samples and utilizes metric learning and triplet loss to assess the similarity index and distinguish different embeddings. The system effectively clusters similar speech embeddings, classifying bona fide speeches as the target class and identifying other clusters as spoofing attacks. The proposed system is evaluated using the ASVspoof 2019 logical access (LA) dataset and tested against unseen deepfake attacks from the ASVspoof 2021 dataset. Additionally, its generalization ability towards unseen bona fide speech is assessed using speech data from the VSDC dataset.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2023

Bridging the Spoof Gap: A Unified Parallel Aggregation Network for Voice Presentation Attacks

Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) systems are increasingly used in voice bio-metrics for user authentication but are susceptible to logical and physical spoofing attacks, posing security risks. Existing research mainly tackles logical or physical attacks separately, leading to a gap in unified spoofing detection. Moreover, when existing systems attempt to handle both types of attacks, they often exhibit significant disparities in the Equal Error Rate (EER). To bridge this gap, we present a Parallel Stacked Aggregation Network that processes raw audio. Our approach employs a split-transform-aggregation technique, dividing utterances into convolved representations, applying transformations, and aggregating the results to identify logical (LA) and physical (PA) spoofing attacks. Evaluation of the ASVspoof-2019 and VSDC datasets shows the effectiveness of the proposed system. It outperforms state-of-the-art solutions, displaying reduced EER disparities and superior performance in detecting spoofing attacks. This highlights the proposed method's generalizability and superiority. In a world increasingly reliant on voice-based security, our unified spoofing detection system provides a robust defense against a spectrum of voice spoofing attacks, safeguarding ASVs and user data effectively.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2023

Frame-to-Utterance Convergence: A Spectra-Temporal Approach for Unified Spoofing Detection

Voice spoofing attacks pose a significant threat to automated speaker verification systems. Existing anti-spoofing methods often simulate specific attack types, such as synthetic or replay attacks. However, in real-world scenarios, the countermeasures are unaware of the generation schema of the attack, necessitating a unified solution. Current unified solutions struggle to detect spoofing artifacts, especially with recent spoofing mechanisms. For instance, the spoofing algorithms inject spectral or temporal anomalies, which are challenging to identify. To this end, we present a spectra-temporal fusion leveraging frame-level and utterance-level coefficients. We introduce a novel local spectral deviation coefficient (SDC) for frame-level inconsistencies and employ a bi-LSTM-based network for sequential temporal coefficients (STC), which capture utterance-level artifacts. Our spectra-temporal fusion strategy combines these coefficients, and an auto-encoder generates spectra-temporal deviated coefficients (STDC) to enhance robustness. Our proposed approach addresses multiple spoofing categories, including synthetic, replay, and partial deepfake attacks. Extensive evaluation on diverse datasets (ASVspoof2019, ASVspoof2021, VSDC, partial spoofs, and in-the-wild deepfakes) demonstrated its robustness for a wide range of voice applications.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2022

Voice Spoofing Countermeasures: Taxonomy, State-of-the-art, experimental analysis of generalizability, open challenges, and the way forward

Malicious actors may seek to use different voice-spoofing attacks to fool ASV systems and even use them for spreading misinformation. Various countermeasures have been proposed to detect these spoofing attacks. Due to the extensive work done on spoofing detection in automated speaker verification (ASV) systems in the last 6-7 years, there is a need to classify the research and perform qualitative and quantitative comparisons on state-of-the-art countermeasures. Additionally, no existing survey paper has reviewed integrated solutions to voice spoofing evaluation and speaker verification, adversarial/antiforensics attacks on spoofing countermeasures, and ASV itself, or unified solutions to detect multiple attacks using a single model. Further, no work has been done to provide an apples-to-apples comparison of published countermeasures in order to assess their generalizability by evaluating them across corpora. In this work, we conduct a review of the literature on spoofing detection using hand-crafted features, deep learning, end-to-end, and universal spoofing countermeasure solutions to detect speech synthesis (SS), voice conversion (VC), and replay attacks. Additionally, we also review integrated solutions to voice spoofing evaluation and speaker verification, adversarial and anti-forensics attacks on voice countermeasures, and ASV. The limitations and challenges of the existing spoofing countermeasures are also presented. We report the performance of these countermeasures on several datasets and evaluate them across corpora. For the experiments, we employ the ASVspoof2019 and VSDC datasets along with GMM, SVM, CNN, and CNN-GRU classifiers. (For reproduceability of the results, the code of the test bed can be found in our GitHub Repository.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2020

Quantum Anonymity for Quantum Networks

We present the first quantum anonymous notification (QAN) protocol that introduces anonymity and paves the way for anonymous secure quantum communication in quantum networks. QAN protocol has applications ranging from multiparty quantum computation to quantum internet. We utilize the QAN protocol to propose an anonymous quantum private comparison protocol in an $n$-node quantum network. This protocol can compare private information of any $2 \leq k \leq n$ parties with the help of the remaining $n-k$ parties and a semi-honest third party. These protocols feature a traceless property, i.e., encoding operations cannot be traced back to their originating sources. Security analysis shows that this protocol is robust against external adversaries and malicious participants.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2020

The Plant Pathology 2020 challenge dataset to classify foliar disease of apples

Apple orchards in the U.S. are under constant threat from a large number of pathogens and insects. Appropriate and timely deployment of disease management depends on early disease detection. Incorrect and delayed diagnosis can result in either excessive or inadequate use of chemicals, with increased production costs, environmental, and health impacts. We have manually captured 3,651 high-quality, real-life symptom images of multiple apple foliar diseases, with variable illumination, angles, surfaces, and noise. A subset, expert-annotated to create a pilot dataset for apple scab, cedar apple rust, and healthy leaves, was made available to the Kaggle community for 'Plant Pathology Challenge'; part of the Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC) workshop at CVPR 2020 (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition). We also trained an off-the-shelf convolutional neural network (CNN) on this data for disease classification and achieved 97% accuracy on a held-out test set. This dataset will contribute towards development and deployment of machine learning-based automated plant disease classification algorithms to ultimately realize fast and accurate disease detection. We will continue to add images to the pilot dataset for a larger, more comprehensive expert-annotated dataset for future Kaggle competitions and to explore more advanced methods for disease classification and quantification.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

SCISPACE: A Scientific Collaboration Workspace for File Systems in Geo-Distributed HPC Data Centers

Future terabit networks are committed to dramatically improving big data motion between geographically dispersed HPC data centers.The scientific community takes advantage of the terabit networks such as DOE's ESnet and accelerates the trend to build a small world of collaboration between geospatial HPC data centers. It improves information and resource sharing for joint simulation and analysis between the HPC data centers. In this paper, we propose to build SCISPACE (Scientific Collaboration Workspace) for collaborative data centers. It provides a global view of information shared from multiple geo-distributed HPC data centers under a single workspace. SCISPACE supports native data-access to gain high-performance when data read or write is required in native data center namespace. It is accomplished by integrating a metadata export protocol. To optimize scientific collaborations across HPC data centers, SCISPACE implements search and discovery service. To evaluate, we configured two geo-distributed small-scale HPC data centers connected via high-speed Infiniband network, equipped with LustreFS. We show the feasibility of SCISPACE using real scientific datasets and applications. The evaluation results show average 36\% performance boost when the proposed native-data access is employed in collaborations.

cs.DC↗