Can a learned Markov chain over a person's webcam frames fool a detector?
research/mimic-webcam-markov
Can a Markov chain over a person's frames fool a detector? No: chains with 8, 32 or 128 states, fitted on one person or on everyone, emitting state centres or real frames, are caught at AUROC 1.000 (one cell 0.999), where stitching the same real frames in 50-frame blocks scored 0.57 to 0.65.
What it found
A first-order Markov chain over k-means states (k = 8, 32, 128) of DUX webcam-signal frames, fitted on one person's earlier windows or on the other 45 people's, emitting state centres or real frames, is scored against that person's later windows by a boosted-tree detector (3 seeds). Every cell is AUROC 1.000 except pooled 128-state member emission at 0.999, in the population and the profile-aware detector alike. Nearly every feature group alone separates them at 0.92 or more, so the chain gets none of the window-scale statistics right even when it emits real frames; 50-frame blocks of the same frames reached 0.57 to 0.65 in the predecessor project. A guess that chains lose between-window differences is only partly supported. Stylised: one form-filling context, first-order chains only.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
More in Adversarial human imitation
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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.