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Hoang-Quoc Nguyen-Son

Publications and source records attributed to Hoang-Quoc Nguyen-Son.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

Fact-Checking at Scale: Multimodal AI for Authenticity and Context Verification in Online Media

The proliferation of multimedia content on social media platforms has dramatically transformed how information is consumed and disseminated. While this shift enables real-time coverage of global events, it also facilitates the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation, especially during crises such as wars, natural disasters, or elections. The rise of synthetic media and the reuse of authentic content in misleading contexts have intensified the need for robust multimedia verification tools. In this paper, we present a comprehensive system developed for the ACM Multimedia 2025 Grand Challenge on Multimedia Verification. Our system assesses the authenticity and contextual accuracy of multimedia content in multilingual settings and generates both expert-oriented verification reports and accessible summaries for the general public. We introduce a unified verification pipeline that integrates visual forensics, textual analysis, and multimodal reasoning, and propose a hybrid approach to detect out-of-context (OOC) media through semantic similarity, temporal alignment, and geolocation cues. Extensive evaluations on the Grand Challenge benchmark demonstrate the system's effectiveness across diverse real-world scenarios. Our contributions advance the state of the art in multimedia verification and offer practical tools for journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers confronting information integrity challenges in the digital age.

cs.MM↗

GeoSearch: Augmenting Worldwide Geolocalization with Web-Scale Reverse Image Search and Image Matching

Worldwide image geolocalization, which aims to predict the GPS coordinates of any image on Earth, remains challenging due to global visual diversity. Recent generative approaches based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) leverage candidates retrieved from fixed databases for reasoning, but often struggle with scenes that are absent from the reference set. In this work, we propose GeoSearch, an open-world geolocation framework that integrates web-scale reverse image search into the RAG pipeline. GeoSearch augments LMM prompts with database-retrieved coordinates and textual evidence extracted from web pages. To mitigate noise from irrelevant content, we introduce a two-layer filtering mechanism consisting of image matching, followed by confidence-based gating. Experiments on standard benchmarks Im2GPS3k and YFCC4k demonstrate the superiority of GeoSearch under leakage-aware evaluation. Our code and data are publicly available to support reproducibility.

cs.IR↗

SearchLLM: Detecting LLM Paraphrased Text by Measuring the Similarity with Regeneration of the Candidate Source via Search Engine

With the advent of large language models (LLMs), it has become common practice for users to draft text and utilize LLMs to enhance its quality through paraphrasing. However, this process can sometimes result in the loss or distortion of the original intended meaning. Due to the human-like quality of LLM-generated text, traditional detection methods often fail, particularly when text is paraphrased to closely mimic original content. In response to these challenges, we propose a novel approach named SearchLLM, designed to identify LLM-paraphrased text by leveraging search engine capabilities to locate potential original text sources. By analyzing similarities between the input and regenerated versions of candidate sources, SearchLLM effectively distinguishes LLM-paraphrased content. SearchLLM is designed as a proxy layer, allowing seamless integration with existing detectors to enhance their performance. Experimental results across various LLMs demonstrate that SearchLLM consistently enhances the accuracy of recent detectors in detecting LLM-paraphrased text that closely mimics original content. Furthermore, SearchLLM also helps the detectors prevent paraphrasing attacks.

cs.CL↗

Quality Assurance of A GPT-based Sentiment Analysis System: Adversarial Review Data Generation and Detection

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been garnering significant attention of AI researchers, especially following the widespread popularity of ChatGPT. However, due to LLMs' intricate architecture and vast parameters, several concerns and challenges regarding their quality assurance require to be addressed. In this paper, a fine-tuned GPT-based sentiment analysis model is first constructed and studied as the reference in AI quality analysis. Then, the quality analysis related to data adequacy is implemented, including employing the content-based approach to generate reasonable adversarial review comments as the wrongly-annotated data, and developing surprise adequacy (SA)-based techniques to detect these abnormal data. Experiments based on Amazon.com review data and a fine-tuned GPT model were implemented. Results were thoroughly discussed from the perspective of AI quality assurance to present the quality analysis of an LLM model on generated adversarial textual data and the effectiveness of using SA on anomaly detection in data quality assurance.

cs.SE↗

VoteTRANS: Detecting Adversarial Text without Training by Voting on Hard Labels of Transformations

Adversarial attacks reveal serious flaws in deep learning models. More dangerously, these attacks preserve the original meaning and escape human recognition. Existing methods for detecting these attacks need to be trained using original/adversarial data. In this paper, we propose detection without training by voting on hard labels from predictions of transformations, namely, VoteTRANS. Specifically, VoteTRANS detects adversarial text by comparing the hard labels of input text and its transformation. The evaluation demonstrates that VoteTRANS effectively detects adversarial text across various state-of-the-art attacks, models, and datasets.

cs.CL↗

SEPP: Similarity Estimation of Predicted Probabilities for Defending and Detecting Adversarial Text

There are two cases describing how a classifier processes input text, namely, misclassification and correct classification. In terms of misclassified texts, a classifier handles the texts with both incorrect predictions and adversarial texts, which are generated to fool the classifier, which is called a victim. Both types are misunderstood by the victim, but they can still be recognized by other classifiers. This induces large gaps in predicted probabilities between the victim and the other classifiers. In contrast, text correctly classified by the victim is often successfully predicted by the others and induces small gaps. In this paper, we propose an ensemble model based on similarity estimation of predicted probabilities (SEPP) to exploit the large gaps in the misclassified predictions in contrast to small gaps in the correct classification. SEPP then corrects the incorrect predictions of the misclassified texts. We demonstrate the resilience of SEPP in defending and detecting adversarial texts through different types of victim classifiers, classification tasks, and adversarial attacks.

cs.CL↗

Influences of Human Demographics, Brand Familiarity and Security Backgrounds on Homograph Recognition

Homograph attack is a way that attackers deceive victims about which website domain name they are communicating with by exploiting the fact that many characters look alike. The attack becomes serious and is raising broad attention when recently many brand domains have been attacked such as Apple Inc., Adobe Inc., Lloyds Bank, etc. We first design a survey of human demographics, brand familiarity, and security backgrounds and apply it to 2,067 participants. We build a regression model to study which factors affect participants' ability in recognizing homograph domains. We find that for different levels of visual similarity, the participants exhibit different abilities. 13.95% of participants can recognize non-homographs while 16.60% of participants can recognize homographs whose the visual similarity with the target brand domains is under 99.9%; but when the similarity increases to 99.9%, the number of participants who can recognize homographs significantly drops down to only 0.19%; and for the homographs with 100% of visual similarity, there is no way for the participants to recognize. We also find that female participants tend to recognize homographs better the male but male participants tend to able to recognize non-homographs better than females. Security knowledge is a significant factor affecting both homographs and non-homographs; surprisingly, people who have strong security knowledge tend to be able to recognize homographs but not non-homographs. Furthermore, people who work or are educated in computer science or computer engineering do not appear as a factor affecting the ability in recognizing homographs; however, interestingly, right after they are explained about the homograph attack, people who work or are educated in computer science or computer engineering are the ones who can capture the situation the most quickly.

cs.CR↗

Identifying Adversarial Sentences by Analyzing Text Complexity

Attackers create adversarial text to deceive both human perception and the current AI systems to perform malicious purposes such as spam product reviews and fake political posts. We investigate the difference between the adversarial and the original text to prevent the risk. We prove that the text written by a human is more coherent and fluent. Moreover, the human can express the idea through the flexible text with modern words while a machine focuses on optimizing the generated text by the simple and common words. We also suggest a method to identify the adversarial text by extracting the features related to our findings. The proposed method achieves high performance with 82.0% of accuracy and 18.4% of equal error rate, which is better than the existing methods whose the best accuracy is 77.0% corresponding to the error rate 22.8%.

cs.CL↗

Detecting Machine-Translated Text using Back Translation

Machine-translated text plays a crucial role in the communication of people using different languages. However, adversaries can use such text for malicious purposes such as plagiarism and fake review. The existing methods detected a machine-translated text only using the text's intrinsic content, but they are unsuitable for classifying the machine-translated and human-written texts with the same meanings. We have proposed a method to extract features used to distinguish machine/human text based on the similarity between the intrinsic text and its back-translation. The evaluation of detecting translated sentences with French shows that our method achieves 75.0% of both accuracy and F-score. It outperforms the existing methods whose the best accuracy is 62.8% and the F-score is 62.7%. The proposed method even detects more efficiently the back-translated text with 83.4% of accuracy, which is higher than 66.7% of the best previous accuracy. We also achieve similar results not only with F-score but also with similar experiments related to Japanese. Moreover, we prove that our detector can recognize both machine-translated and machine-back-translated texts without the language information which is used to generate these machine texts. It demonstrates the persistence of our method in various applications in both low- and rich-resource languages.

cs.CL↗

Detecting Machine-Translated Paragraphs by Matching Similar Words

Machine-translated text plays an important role in modern life by smoothing communication from various communities using different languages. However, unnatural translation may lead to misunderstanding, a detector is thus needed to avoid the unfortunate mistakes. While a previous method measured the naturalness of continuous words using a N-gram language model, another method matched noncontinuous words across sentences but this method ignores such words in an individual sentence. We have developed a method matching similar words throughout the paragraph and estimating the paragraph-level coherence, that can identify machine-translated text. Experiment evaluates on 2000 English human-generated and 2000 English machine-translated paragraphs from German showing that the coherence-based method achieves high performance (accuracy = 87.0%; equal error rate = 13.0%). It is efficiently better than previous methods (best accuracy = 72.4%; equal error rate = 29.7%). Similar experiments on Dutch and Japanese obtain 89.2% and 97.9% accuracy, respectively. The results demonstrate the persistence of the proposed method in various languages with different resource levels.

cs.CL↗

Identifying Computer-Translated Paragraphs using Coherence Features

We have developed a method for extracting the coherence features from a paragraph by matching similar words in its sentences. We conducted an experiment with a parallel German corpus containing 2000 human-created and 2000 machine-translated paragraphs. The result showed that our method achieved the best performance (accuracy = 72.3%, equal error rate = 29.8%) when it is compared with previous methods on various computer-generated text including translation and paper generation (best accuracy = 67.9%, equal error rate = 32.0%). Experiments on Dutch, another rich resource language, and a low resource one (Japanese) attained similar performances. It demonstrated the efficiency of the coherence features at distinguishing computer-translated from human-created paragraphs on diverse languages.

cs.CL↗

Transformation on Computer-Generated Facial Image to Avoid Detection by Spoofing Detector

Making computer-generated (CG) images more difficult to detect is an interesting problem in computer graphics and security. While most approaches focus on the image rendering phase, this paper presents a method based on increasing the naturalness of CG facial images from the perspective of spoofing detectors. The proposed method is implemented using a convolutional neural network (CNN) comprising two autoencoders and a transformer and is trained using a black-box discriminator without gradient information. Over 50% of the transformed CG images were not detected by three state-of-the-art spoofing detectors. This capability raises an alarm regarding the reliability of facial authentication systems, which are becoming widely used in daily life.

cs.CV↗