When the Few Outweigh the Many: Illicit Content Recognition with Few-Shot Learning

The anonymity and untraceability benefits of the Dark web account for the exponentially-increased potential of its popularity while creating a suitable womb for many illicit activities, to date. Hence, in collaboration with cybersecurity and law enforcement agencies, research has provided approaches for recognizing and classifying illicit activities with most exploiting textual dark web markets’ content recognition; few such approaches use images that originated from dark web content. This paper investigates this alternative technique for recognizing illegal activities from images. In particular, we investigate label-agnostic learning techniques like One-Shot and Few-Shot learning featuring the use Siamese neural networks, a state-of-the-art approach in the field. Our solution manages to handle small-scale datasets with promising accuracy. In particular, Siamese neural networks reach 90.9% on 20-Shot experiments over a 10-class dataset; this leads us to conclude that such models are a promising and cheaper alternative to the definition of automated law-enforcing machinery over the dark web.