Author name cluster

Akshay Agarwal

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9 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Short Paper

Guarding Digital Identity: Attention-Guided Fusion for Detecting Forged ID Documents (Student Abstract)

Gargi Surendra Yeole
Poulomi Bhattacharya
Akshay Agarwal

Government verification systems are increasingly relying on internet-based platforms, where users authenticate their identities by uploading images captured with ordinary mobile devices. However, the rapid advancements in generative algorithms have enabled the creation of highly realistic forged ID cards that can easily bypass such verification pipelines. These forgeries are not restricted to a single modality; they may target facial imagery, textual content, or both, posing significant challenges to existing detection approaches. We present a framework that analyzes visual features for ID forgery detection by integrating feature fusion with attention mechanisms, leveraging both convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, such as ResNet-50 and EfficientNet, and transformer-based models, including ViT-16 and Swin Transformer. This study emphasises the significance of feature fusion and attention-driven representation learning in developing robust and trustworthy ID forgery detection systems for real-world deployment.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Short Paper

Improving CAPTCHA Robustness via Controlled Image Corruptions (Student Abstract)

Suchetan G. Uppur
Ashish Kumar
Akshay Agarwal

The Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is widely deployed on the web as a security mechanism to distinguish humans from automated bots. However, their robustness is being challenged by the rapid advancements in AI, with models capable of near-human level character recognition rendering CAPTCHA obsolete. This research aims to systematically study the effect of multiple image corruptions, including elastic transformations, blur, noise, and occlusions, on human readability and automated solvers in text-based CAPTCHA recognition. We conduct experiments on multimodal large language models (MLLMs), a traditional deep learning-based optical character recognition (OCR) system, and human subjects. Using an existing CAPTCHA dataset and artificially corrupted versions, we analyze the recognition performance of AI models and humans, identifying vulnerabilities and patterns of robustness. The findings will contribute to a better understanding of CAPTCHA vulnerabilities and explore potential methods to increase the robustness of CAPTCHA in the era of advanced AI models.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Short Paper

Q-MoFusion: A Quantum Classifier for Masquito Species Classification (Student Abstract)

Vishesh Kumar
Ahana Chanda
Poulomi Bhattacharya
Akshay Agarwal

Automated mosquito species identification is critical for combating vector-borne diseases. We introduce Q-MoFusion, a novel hybrid quantum-classical framework that fuses deep features from pre-trained Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) and Whisper models using a Variational Quantum Circuit (VQC). Our approach significantly outperforms individual backbones and prior state-of-the-art benchmarks, demonstrating superior accuracy and robustness, particularly on imbalanced classes. Q-MoFusion demonstrates the potential of hybrid quantum computing to enhance bioacoustic surveillance for addressing critical public health challenges.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Short Paper

Semantic-Guided Sketch-to-RGB Image Generation via Controlled Diffusion for Improved Sketch Recognition (Student Abstract)

Ritika Jain
Atul Kumar
Akshay Agarwal

Although deep networks excel on RGB images, their performance degrades sharply under severe domain shifts—such as sketch recognition, where color and texture cues are missing. In this work, we propose a novel pipeline that leverages semantic cues extracted from sketches to guide the synthesis of photorealistic RGB images using diffusion-based generative models. Our framework operates by extracting two crucial cues from the input sketch: semantic captions via the BLIP model and structural outlines via Canny edge detection. These cues are then integrated using ControlNet to guide a Stable Diffusion model, ensuring the synthesized RGB image is both semantically consistent with the content and structurally faithful to the original sketch. We evaluated our synthesized images by benchmarking classification performance. We trained standard architectures (from convolutional to transformer-based) on Tiny-ImageNet subsets and tested them on sketches, their synthesized counterparts, and the original RGB images. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach produces realistic, identity-preserving images, which significantly improve classification accuracy and effectively bridge the semantic gap. While BLIP-based captioning and ControlNet-guided diffusion are established methods, our contribution lies in their integration into a unified, caption-guided pipeline that enhances sketch-to-RGB translation with improved semantic consistency. The proposed method generalizes well across architectures, providing a scalable and cost-efficient solution for sketch-based image synthesis.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Short Paper

WingBeats and Snapshots: Fusing Sound and Vision for Mosquito Monitoring (Student Abstract)

Ahana Chanda
Akshay Agarwal

Accurate identification of mosquito species is crucial for controlling vector-borne diseases, yet visual or acoustic methods alone are often insufficient. We propose a multimodal deep-learning framework that combines high-resolution images with wingbeat audio using a SwinV2 vision transformer and an Audio Spectrogram Transformer, thereby capturing complementary cues. On a six-species dataset, it achieves 97% accuracy, comparable to the best single-modality baseline, and is designed to improve robustness under noise or environmental variation, demonstrating the value of integrating multiple data sources for reliable mosquito surveillance.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Short Paper

Detection of Digital Manipulation in Facial Images (Student Abstract)

Aman Mehra
Akshay Agarwal
Mayank Vatsa
Richa Singh

Advances in deep learning have enabled the creation of photo-realistic DeepFakes by switching the identity or expression of individuals. Such technology in the wrong hands can seed chaos through blackmail, extortion, and forging false statements of influential individuals. This work proposes a novel approach to detect forged videos by magnifying their temporal inconsistencies. A study is also conducted to understand role of ethnicity bias due to skewed datasets on deepfake detection. A new dataset comprising forged videos of Indian ethnicity individuals is presented to facilitate this study.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Short Paper

Role of Optimizer on Network Fine-tuning for Adversarial Robustness (Student Abstract)

Akshay Agarwal
Mayank Vatsa
Richa Singh

The solutions proposed in the literature for adversarial robustness are either not effective against the challenging gradientbased attacks or are computationally demanding, such as adversarial training. Adversarial training or network training based data augmentation shows the potential to increase the adversarial robustness. While the training seems compelling, it is not feasible for resource-constrained institutions, especially academia, to train the network from scratch multiple times. The two fold contributions are: (i) providing an effective solution against white-box adversarial attacks via network fine-tuning steps and (ii) observing the role of different optimizers towards robustness. Extensive experiments are performed on a range of databases, including Fashion- MNIST and a subset of ImageNet. It is found that the few steps of network fine-tuning effectively increases the robustness of both shallow and deep architectures. To know other interesting observations, especially regarding the role of the optimizer, refer to the paper.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

On the Robustness of Face Recognition Algorithms Against Attacks and Bias

Richa Singh
Akshay Agarwal
Maneet Singh
Shruti Nagpal
Mayank Vatsa

Face recognition algorithms have demonstrated very high recognition performance, suggesting suitability for real world applications. Despite the enhanced accuracies, robustness of these algorithms against attacks and bias has been challenged. This paper summarizes different ways in which the robustness of a face recognition algorithm is challenged, which can severely affect its intended working. Different types of attacks such as physical presentation attacks, disguise/makeup, digital adversarial attacks, and morphing/tampering using GANs have been discussed. We also present a discussion on the effect of bias on face recognition models and showcase that factors such as age and gender variations affect the performance of modern algorithms. The paper also presents the potential reasons for these challenges and some of the future research directions for increasing the robustness of face recognition models.

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AAAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Unravelling Robustness of Deep Learning Based Face Recognition Against Adversarial Attacks

Gaurav Goswami
Nalini Ratha
Akshay Agarwal
Richa Singh
Mayank Vatsa

Deep neural network (DNN) architecture based models have high expressive power and learning capacity. However, they are essentially a black box method since it is not easy to mathematically formulate the functions that are learned within its many layers of representation. Realizing this, many researchers have started to design methods to exploit the drawbacks of deep learning based algorithms questioning their robustness and exposing their singularities. In this paper, we attempt to unravel three aspects related to the robustness of DNNs for face recognition: (i) assessing the impact of deep architectures for face recognition in terms of vulnerabilities to attacks inspired by commonly observed distortions in the real world that are well handled by shallow learning methods along with learning based adversaries; (ii) detecting the singularities by characterizing abnormal ﬁlter response behavior in the hidden layers of deep networks; and (iii) making corrections to the processing pipeline to alleviate the problem. Our experimental evaluation using multiple open-source DNN-based face recognition networks, including OpenFace and VGG-Face, and two publicly available databases (MEDS and PaSC) demonstrates that the performance of deep learning based face recognition algorithms can suffer greatly in the presence of such distortions. The proposed method is also compared with existing detection algorithms and the results show that it is able to detect the attacks with very high accuracy by suitably designing a classiﬁer using the response of the hidden layers in the network. Finally, we present several effective countermeasures to mitigate the impact of adversarial attacks and improve the overall robustness of DNN-based face recognition.

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