media monitoring teams

Abstract: News outlets covering the same event differ in what they emphasize and omit. \textit{Same Story, Different Lens} is an experimental research prototype for comparing these choices. It collects world and politics coverage from 17 outlets, groups reports about the same event, and produces structured analyses of sentiment, political lean, framing, loaded language, possible omissions, and model-estimated proportions of factual claims and opinion. Loaded-language entries include quotations and neutral rewordings. Three model roles (agents) handle article analysis, assessment of source support, and cross-outlet briefing generation. Analyses are stored in a JSONL archive. The evaluation compares outlet-level lean estimates with approximate, predefined reference ratings and summarizes the Critic's model-assigned grounding scores. These measures provide preliminary diagnostics. A grounding score reflects the model's assessment of support in the supplied text and does not establish factual accuracy or constitute independent verification.

Abstract: The rapid progress of generative artificial intelligence has led to a significant increase in manipulated multimedia content, including synthetic faces, forged videos, AI-generated images, fake audio, and locally edited images. Existing detection approaches are typically designed for a single manipulation type, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios involving heterogeneous media sources. In this work, we present the Media Intelligence Platform (MIP), a unified web-based framework for multimodal media forensics integrating specialized modules for fake video detection, face morphing detection, AI-generated image detection, audio deepfake detection, localized image manipulation detection, and text analysis. Its modular architecture enables flexible integration of heterogeneous models and supports future extensions for emerging manipulation techniques. Experimental results on representative benchmark datasets demonstrate reliable detection performance across multiple media modalities while providing a practical and user-friendly interface for forensic investigations. The platform highlights the potential of unified multimodal systems for comprehensive deepfake detection in real-world environments, and is accompanied by a public demonstrator released with this workshop submission to support reproducibility and community evaluation.

Abstract: Digital-witnessing research explains how citizen testimony becomes publicly visible. Less is known about audience uptake after publication and whether the attributed source corresponds to the form of response. This study analyzes 47,635 posts (April 2022 to May 2026) from Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher, a diaspora-based account that curates and publishes reports and testimony from inside China for transnational audiences. Among 25,093 witness-relevant posts, 3,601 explicitly attribute their material to ordinary submitters. These posts receive more replies than other witness-relevant posts across adjusted analyses and show a more reply-oriented profile. The primary doubly robust retweet estimate is near zero. Among audited replies to November 2022 user-submitted posts, 91.4% substantively engage the focal material. The pattern is consistent with ordinary-person source attribution presenting testimony as situated and open to public response. The study extends digital witnessing beyond visibility by separating redistribution from the public response that gathers around testimony.

Abstract: In the era of big data, precise event retrieval from large video collections has become increasingly important and challenging. In particular, locating multiple events from the same video in their temporal order is difficult when different events are described by different types of evidence, such as visual content, on-screen text, and spoken words. We develop EVISTA, a unified multimodal video retrieval system for the Ho Chi Minh City AI Challenge 2026, which integrates visual-semantic, OCR, ASR, object, and metadata search over a shared keyframe index, and propose TEMPO-P, an evidence-aware temporal path optimization method for ordered multi-event retrieval. Building EVISTA for this task reveals two limitations of independent event retrieval: a relevant video may be missed when one event is weakly retrieved, and independently retrieved event candidates may be temporally inconsistent or unable to represent events defined primarily by text or speech. TEMPO-P addresses these limitations by aggregating candidate videos across events and modalities, jointly scoring keyframes using visual, OCR, and ASR evidence, and selecting a compact temporally ordered path within each video through dynamic programming. On five organizer queries and 36 additional multi-event queries, TEMPO-P matches visual-only temporal alignment on visually described events (R@1 0.42 for both) and retrieves queries containing text-defined events, which visual-only alignment cannot represent (R@1 0.38). TEMPO-P is integrated into EVISTA as its ordered-event retrieval mode.

Abstract: Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) aims to retrieve untrimmed videos containing moments relevant to a given text query. Despite recent progress, existing PRVR methods suffer from two key limitations: a fixed video decomposition scheme that causes semantic dilution, and source-domain overfitting induced by task-specific training. In this paper, we propose TF-PRVR, the first training-free framework for PRVR. TF-PRVR leverages frozen vision-language features to construct video-specific hierarchical representations. It derives temporal semantic signals from frame-level features and applies frequency-based multi-scale analysis to identify adaptive temporal boundaries, producing hierarchical segments with coherent event-level semantics. Built on these segments, TF-PRVR constructs a unified multi-scale graph and propagates query relevance across temporally and semantically related nodes. A moment-aware scoring strategy then aggregates temporally aligned relevance across scales, emphasizing consistently supported moments while suppressing isolated false responses. Without task-specific training, TF-PRVR preserves the general-purpose alignment capability of pre-trained vision-language models and avoids dataset-specific overfitting. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent performance across datasets with diverse visual and temporal characteristics, suggesting a practical direction for training-free PRVR.

Abstract: Existing deep research agents are designed primarily for text- and image-based web sources, while video reasoning systems typically assume that relevant videos are provided in advance. We study open-web video research, where an agent must autonomously discover relevant videos, navigate their temporal content, and ground answers in visual evidence. Training such agents at scale is challenging as live video interaction is slow and unreliable, whereas fixed local simulation can induce retrieval-specific shortcuts that fail to transfer to the open web. We introduce VideoResearchAgent, a scalable training framework to address these challenges. First, we introduce controllable task synthesis pipeline to synthesize multi-hop research tasks from timestamped visual evidence while filtering text-only shortcuts. Second, we build a field-aligned local video simulator that preserves deployment-facing search and watch interactions while accelerating video search by a factor of 34.5-64.6. Third, we introduce Retrieval-Domain-Randomized GRPO (RDR-GRPO), which diversifies candidate rankings, distractors, metadata, and result structure during training to reduce overfitting to simulated retrieval. On Video-BrowseComp, the VideoResearchAgent trained using Qwen3.5-4B achieves 40.48% accuracy, comparable to Gemini-3-Flash-Preview, while reducing cumulative API-token consumption by 74.9% relative to the untrained model. Together, these results establish an accurate and efficient training recipe for open-web video research.

Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) support multimodal fake news detection (FND) by producing explicit analyses. Recent methods further improve interpretability by organizing verification knowledge into explicit concepts. However, two questions remain: how to improve the reliability and applicability of verification concepts, and how to effectively apply reusable concepts to verify unseen news. We propose \textbf{ReVR}, a dual-path reasoning framework that constructs and applies reusable verification concepts for multimodal fake news detection. An agentic workflow grounds and consolidates candidate concepts, while statistical profiles characterize their historical behavior. During inference, a coverage-oriented path aggregates evidence from the complete concept library using a trainable encoder, while a query-focused path prompts a frozen VLM to reason over selected concepts and their observations. A learned conflict resolver selects between the two predictions when they disagree. Experiments on fake news benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the method regarding detection performance and generalizability.

Abstract: While Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong performance, reliably evaluating their fine-grained video understanding remains challenging. Existing benchmarks often rely on question answering or ground-truth caption matching, where models may succeed through superficial cues and incomplete annotations. To this end, we introduce VidOmni-Bench, a benchmark that requires models to verify whether each event in dense video captions is supported by the video. VidOmni-Bench consists of 500 videos spanning five complexity types and diverse durations from 4 seconds to 90 minutes. After collecting videos along these axes, we use diverse Video-LLMs to generate dense captions and obtain human-verified sentence-level labels, where sentences containing incorrect events serve as hard negatives for evaluation. Our experiments on VidOmni-Bench reveal three key findings: (i) Video-LLMs frequently generate hallucinated descriptions in dense video captioning; (ii) they also struggle as verifiers, failing to reliably detect plausible but incorrect event descriptions; and (iii) model weaknesses vary across video complexity and duration, revealing diverse, model-specific bottlenecks in current Video-LLMs.

Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2026 Challenge Task 6, Audio Moment Retrieval (AMR) from Long Audio. Given a several-minute-long audio recording and a free-form text query, AMR aims to retrieve temporal moments in the recording that match the query, where each moment is represented by a pair of start and end timestamps. This task requires effective cross-modal alignment and long-range temporal modeling. We describe the task definition, the evaluation metrics, the development and evaluation datasets, and a baseline system that combines a pre-trained MS-CLAP feature extractor with a Detection Transformer (DETR)-based moment-detection network. On the development data, the baseline trained on a manually annotated dataset and a synthetic dataset achieved Recall1@0.7 of 13.56%, indicating that AMR in long audio remains a challenging problem. The challenge attracted 21 teams, which submitted 59 systems in total. The three best systems achieved Recall1@0.7 of 48.59%, roughly 3.5 times the baseline score. The results show that strengthening the audio-text feature extractor and the moment-detection network led to substantial performance improvements. Furthermore, the top three teams boosted performance by applying confidence score calibration or ensembling across different temporal resolutions of features.

Abstract: Searching large video collections is typically an interactive process in which users play two roles. First, they hold the search intent: the underlying goal that determines what content they seek and why. Second, users must operationalize this intent through an iterative search loop. Users translate their intent into queries, browse the retrieved candidates, and refine their queries based on the results. In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of modern Vision Language Models (VLM) and agentic approaches to reach search goals interactively and fully autonomously. Specifically, we study whether a provided initial specification of a search goal might be sufficient to solve traditionally interactive search tasks with an agentic system. Provided that the involved VLMs are not aware of the whole large video dataset in advance, the key challenge lies in the effective combination of an existing interactive video search system and a smart VLM agent controlling the system. While the search system provides indexing and efficient querying, the VLM-based agents analyze top-ranked items and make decisions about next actions. Our results show that modern agents can autonomously operate interactive video retrieval systems to solve many search tasks from an initial intent description, achieving performance competitive with strong historical expert-operated systems in several settings.