arXiv subjects

Cristian Rusu

Publications and source records attributed to Cristian Rusu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Deepfake Media Generation and Detection in the Generative AI Era: A Survey and Outlook

We survey deepfake generation and detection techniques, covering all deepfake media types: image, video, audio and multimodal content. We identify various kinds of deepfakes and construct taxonomies of deepfake generation and detection methods, illustrating the important groups of methods. Next, we gather datasets used for deepfake detection and provide updated rankings of the best performing detectors on the most popular datasets. In addition, we develop a novel multimodal benchmark to evaluate deepfake detectors on out-of-distribution content. The results indicate that state-of-the-art detectors fail to generalize to deepfakes generated by unseen generators. Our project page and new benchmark are available at https://github.com/CroitoruAlin/biodeep.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Detecting and Mitigating DDoS Attacks with AI: A Survey

Distributed Denial of Service attacks represent an active cybersecurity research problem. Recent research shifted from static rule-based defenses towards AI-based detection and mitigation. This comprehensive survey covers several key topics. Preeminently, state-of-the-art AI detection methods are discussed. An in-depth taxonomy based on manual expert hierarchies and an AI-generated dendrogram are provided, thus settling DDoS categorization ambiguities. An important discussion on available datasets follows, covering data format options and their role in training AI detection methods together with adversarial training and examples augmentation. Beyond detection, AI based mitigation techniques are surveyed as well. Finally, multiple open research directions are proposed.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Real-time loosely coupled GNSS and IMU integration via Factor Graph Optimization

Accurate positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) is fundamental to the operation of modern technologies and a key enabler of autonomous systems. A very important component of PNT is the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) which ensures outdoor positioning. Modern research directions have pushed the performance of GNSS localization to new heights by fusing GNSS measurements with other sensory information, mainly measurements from Inertial Measurement Units (IMU). In this paper, we propose a loosely coupled architecture to integrate GNSS and IMU measurements using a Factor Graph Optimization (FGO) framework. Because the FGO method can be computationally challenging and often used as a post-processing method, our focus is on assessing its localization accuracy and service availability while operating in real-time in challenging environments (urban canyons). Experimental results on the UrbanNav-HK-MediumUrban-1 dataset show that the proposed approach achieves real-time operation and increased service availability compared to batch FGO methods. While this improvement comes at the cost of reduced positioning accuracy, the paper provides a detailed analysis of the trade-offs between accuracy, availability, and computational efficiency that characterize real-time FGO-based GNSS/IMU fusion.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Real-time tightly coupled GNSS and IMU integration via Factor Graph Optimization

Reliable positioning in dense urban environments remains challenging due to frequent GNSS signal blockage, multipath, and rapidly varying satellite geometry. While factor graph optimization (FGO)-based GNSS-IMU fusion has demonstrated strong robustness and accuracy, most formulations remain offline. In this work, we present a real-time tightly coupled GNSS-IMU FGO method that enables causal state estimation via incremental optimization with fixed-lag marginalization, and we evaluate its performance in a highly urbanized GNSS-degraded environment using the UrbanNav dataset.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

XMAD-Bench: Cross-Domain Multilingual Audio Deepfake Benchmark

Recent advances in audio generation led to an increasing number of deepfakes, making the general public more vulnerable to financial scams, identity theft, and misinformation. Audio deepfake detectors promise to alleviate this issue, with many recent studies reporting accuracy rates close to 99%. However, these methods are typically tested in an in-domain setup, where the deepfake samples from the training and test sets are produced by the same generative models. To this end, we introduce XMAD-Bench, a large-scale cross-domain multilingual audio deepfake benchmark comprising 668.8 hours of real and deepfake speech. In our novel dataset, the speakers, the generative methods, and the real audio sources are distinct across training and test splits. This leads to a challenging cross-domain evaluation setup, where audio deepfake detectors can be tested "in the wild". Our in-domain and cross-domain experiments indicate a clear disparity between the in-domain performance of deepfake detectors, which is usually as high as 100%, and the cross-domain performance of the same models, which is sometimes similar to random chance. Our benchmark highlights the need for the development of robust audio deepfake detectors, which maintain their generalization capacity across different languages, speakers, generative methods, and data sources. Our benchmark is publicly released at https://github.com/ristea/xmad-bench/.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

A Note on Shift Retrieval Problems

In this note, we discuss the shift retrieval problems, both classical and compressed, and provide connections between them using circulant matrices. We review the properties of circulant matrices necessary for our calculations and then show how shifts can be recovered from a single measurement.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

An iterative Jacobi-like algorithm to compute a few sparse approximate eigenvectors

In this paper, we describe a new algorithm that approximates the extreme eigenvalue/eigenvector pairs of a symmetric matrix. The proposed algorithm can be viewed as an extension of the Jacobi eigenvalue method for symmetric matrices diagonalization to the case where we want to approximate just a few extreme eigenvalues/eigenvectors. The method is also particularly well-suited for the computation of sparse approximations of the eigenvectors. In fact, we show that in general, our method provides a trade-off between the sparsity of the computed approximate eigenspaces and their accuracy. We provide theoretical results that show the linear convergence of the proposed method. Finally, we show experimental numerical results for sparse low-rank approximations of random symmetric matrices and show applications to graph Fourier transforms, and the sparse principal component analysis in image classification experiments. These applications are chosen because, in these cases, there is no need to perform the eigenvalue decomposition to high precision to achieve good numerical results.

math.NA↗

arXiv2024

Learning Explicitly Conditioned Sparsifying Transforms

Sparsifying transforms became in the last decades widely known tools for finding structured sparse representations of signals in certain transform domains. Despite the popularity of classical transforms such as DCT and Wavelet, learning optimal transforms that guarantee good representations of data into the sparse domain has been recently analyzed in a series of papers. Typically, the conditioning number and representation ability are complementary key features of learning square transforms that may not be explicitly controlled in a given optimization model. Unlike the existing approaches from the literature, in our paper, we consider a new sparsifying transform model that enforces explicit control over the data representation quality and the condition number of the learned transforms. We confirm through numerical experiments that our model presents better numerical behavior than the state-of-the-art.

math.NA↗

arXiv2023

Kernel t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding

This paper presents a kernelized version of the t-SNE algorithm, capable of mapping high-dimensional data to a low-dimensional space while preserving the pairwise distances between the data points in a non-Euclidean metric. This can be achieved using a kernel trick only in the high dimensional space or in both spaces, leading to an end-to-end kernelized version. The proposed kernelized version of the t-SNE algorithm can offer new views on the relationships between data points, which can improve performance and accuracy in particular applications, such as classification problems involving kernel methods. The differences between t-SNE and its kernelized version are illustrated for several datasets, showing a neater clustering of points belonging to different classes.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Multidimensional orthogonal matching pursuit: theory and application to high accuracy joint localization and communication at mmWave

Greedy approaches in general, and orthogonal matching pursuit in particular, are the most commonly used sparse recovery techniques in a wide range of applications. The complexity of these approaches is highly dependent on the size of the dictionary chosen to represent the sparse signal. When the dictionary has to be large to enable high accuracy reconstructions, greedy strategies might however incur in prohibitive complexity. In this paper, we propose first the formulation of a new type of sparse recovery problems where the sparse signal is represented by a set of independent and smaller dictionaries instead of a large single one. Then, we derive a low complexity multdimensional orthogonal matching pursuit (MOMP) strategy for sparse recovery with a multdimensional dictionary. The projection step is performed iteratively on every dimension of the dictionary while fixing all other dimensions to achieve high accuracy estimation at a reasonable complexity. Finally, we formulate the problem of high resolution time domain channel estimation at millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies as a multidimensional sparse recovery problem that can be solved with MOMP. The channel estimates are later transformed into high accuracy user position estimates exploiting a new localization algorithm that leverages the particular geometry of indoor channels. Simulation results show the effectiveness of MOMP for high accuracy localization at millimeter wave frequencies when operating in realistic 3D scenarios, with practical MIMO architectures feasible at mmWave, and without resorting to perfect synchronization assumptions that simplify the problem.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

Low complexity joint position and channel estimation at millimeter wave based on multidimensional orthogonal matching pursuit

Compressive approaches provide a means of effective channel high resolution channel estimates in millimeter wave MIMO systems, despite the use of analog and hybrid architectures. Such estimates can also be used as part of a joint channel estimation and localization solution. Achieving good localization performance, though, requires high resolution channel estimates and better methods to exploit those channels. In this paper, we propose a low complexity multidimensional orthogonal matching pursuit strategy for compressive channel estimation based by operating with a product of independent dictionaries for the angular and delay domains, instead of a global large dictionary. This leads to higher quality channel estimates but with lower complexity than generalizations of conventional solutions. We couple this new algorithm with a novel localization formulation that does not rely on the absolute time of arrival of the LoS path and exploits the structure of reflections in indoor channels. We show how the new approach is able to operate in realistic 3D scenarios to estimate the communication channel and locate devices in an indoor simulation setting.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2022

Dictionary Learning with Uniform Sparse Representations for Anomaly Detection

Many applications like audio and image processing show that sparse representations are a powerful and efficient signal modeling technique. Finding an optimal dictionary that generates at the same time the sparsest representations of data and the smallest approximation error is a hard problem approached by dictionary learning (DL). We study how DL performs in detecting abnormal samples in a dataset of signals. In this paper we use a particular DL formulation that seeks uniform sparse representations model to detect the underlying subspace of the majority of samples in a dataset, using a K-SVD-type algorithm. Numerical simulations show that one can efficiently use this resulted subspace to discriminate the anomalies over the regular data points.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Efficient and Parallel Separable Dictionary Learning

Separable, or Kronecker product, dictionaries provide natural decompositions for 2D signals, such as images. In this paper, we describe a highly parallelizable algorithm that learns such dictionaries which reaches sparse representations competitive with the previous state of the art dictionary learning algorithms from the literature but at a lower computational cost. We highlight the performance of the proposed method to sparsely represent image and hyperspectral data, and for image denoising.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

An iterative coordinate descent algorithm to compute sparse low-rank approximations

In this paper, we describe a new algorithm to build a few sparse principal components from a given data matrix. Our approach does not explicitly create the covariance matrix of the data and can be viewed as an extension of the Kogbetliantz algorithm to build an approximate singular value decomposition for a few principal components. We show the performance of the proposed algorithm to recover sparse principal components on various datasets from the literature and perform dimensionality reduction for classification applications.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Constructing fast approximate eigenspaces with application to the fast graph Fourier transforms

We investigate numerically efficient approximations of eigenspaces associated to symmetric and general matrices. The eigenspaces are factored into a fixed number of fundamental components that can be efficiently manipulated (we consider extended orthogonal Givens or scaling and shear transformations). The number of these components controls the trade-off between approximation accuracy and the computational complexity of projecting on the eigenspaces. We write minimization problems for the single fundamental components and provide closed-form solutions. Then we propose algorithms that iterative update all these components until convergence. We show results on random matrices and an application on the approximation of graph Fourier transforms for directed and undirected graphs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Fast approximation of orthogonal matrices and application to PCA

We study the problem of approximating orthogonal matrices so that their application is numerically fast and yet accurate. We find an approximation by solving an optimization problem over a set of structured matrices, that we call extended orthogonal Givens transformations, including Givens rotations as a special case. We propose an efficient greedy algorithm to solve such a problem and show that it strikes a balance between approximation accuracy and speed of computation. The approach is relevant to spectral methods and we illustrate its application to PCA.

math.NA↗

arXiv2020

Learning Multiplication-free Linear Transformations

In this paper, we propose several dictionary learning algorithms for sparse representations that also impose specific structures on the learned dictionaries such that they are numerically efficient to use: reduced number of addition/multiplications and even avoiding multiplications altogether. We base our work on factorizations of the dictionary in highly structured basic building blocks (binary orthonormal, scaling and shear transformations) for which we can write closed-form solutions to the optimization problems that we consider. We show the effectiveness of our methods on image data where we can compare against well-known numerically efficient transforms such as the fast Fourier and the fast discrete cosine transforms.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Approximate Eigenvalue Decompositions of Linear Transformations with a Few Householder Reflectors

The ability to decompose a signal in an orthonormal basis (a set of orthogonal components, each normalized to have unit length) using a fast numerical procedure rests at the heart of many signal processing methods and applications. The classic examples are the Fourier and wavelet transforms that enjoy numerically efficient implementations (FFT and FWT, respectively). Unfortunately, orthonormal transformations are in general unstructured, and therefore they do not enjoy low computational complexity properties. In this paper, based on Householder reflectors, we introduce a class of orthonormal matrices that are numerically efficient to manipulate: we control the complexity of matrix-vector multiplications with these matrices using a given parameter. We provide numerical algorithms that approximate any orthonormal or symmetric transform with a new orthonormal or symmetric structure made up of products of a given number of Householder reflectors. We show analyses and numerical evidence to highlight the accuracy of the proposed approximations and provide an application to the case of learning fast Mahanalobis distance metric transformations.

math.NA↗