Arlington, March 5, 2025
U.S. DARPA has entered a cooperative research and development agreement with the Digital Safety Research Institute (DSRI) of UL Research Institutes to continue advancing the research of detection, attribution, and characterization of AI-generated media.
The threat of manipulated media – audio, images, video, and text – has grown recently as automated manipulation technologies become more accessible, and social media continues to provide a ripe environment for viral content sharing.
Beginning with the Media Forensics program in 2016 and continuing with the Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program in 2020, DARPA has produced comprehensive forensic technologies to help mitigate these online threats. As a result of those investments, the agency has systemically driven down development risks for new analytical tools capable of detecting, attributing, and characterizing AI-generated and manipulated media, including images, video, audio, and text—many of which are available via an open-source repository for further use and development.
Since the conclusion of the SemaFor program in September 2024, the agency has been actively transitioning resulting technologies to the U.S. government and working with industry to commercialize these tools. In addition, DARPA seeks to engage the broader research community to keep pace with the rapid evolution of generative AI technologies.
As part of the agreement, DSRI will manage SemaFor’s ongoing open competition, the AI Forensics Open Research Challenge Evaluations (AI FORCE), announce challenge results, and award research grants at academic conferences, like the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. By having special sessions at conferences to announce the grant awardees, DSRI aims to continue an open scientific research ecosystem where techniques and ideas are shared.
“Innovation does not occur in a vacuum, so it’s important for us to communicate about the work we’re doing to engage with industry, academia and potential transition partners to develop the technology for practical applications,” said Wil Corvey, DARPA’s SemaFor program manager. “DSRI’s mission of product testing and evaluation, specifically with respect to the complex and evolving sociotechnical environment in which products will be deployed, makes them an ideal fit for this area of transition.”
“It is important for the public to know the genre and provenance of the content presented in our digital information ecosystem – much in the same way physical libraries label the genre, like fiction vs. non-fiction and cite the provenance of their materials,” said Dr. Jill Crisman, executive director of DSRI of UL Research Institutes. “DSRI aims to enable digital information testing and inspection tools keep pace with the rapid advances of generative AI.”
Hear from Corvey and SemaFor performers in the Voices from DARPA episode, “Demystifying Deepfakes.”
For more information on the above efforts and resources, visit semanticforensics.com.
Source – U.S. DARPA