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Adversarial human imitation

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.

5 tests

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

Figure produced by research/mimic-webcam-markov: markov
mimic-webcam-markov/experiments/markov.svg, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

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Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1

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.