Papers for
multimedia platform developers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Long video agents choose when to stop gathering information efficiently
CASE: Cost-Aware Stopping for Efficient Long-Video Agents
Abstract: Long-video agents can actively gather question-relevant evidence, but they typically leave a central decision implicit: when has the agent seen enough to answer? We propose CASE, a plug-in termination framework that frames this decision as policy-conditioned sequential stopping. At each causal checkpoint, CASE combines an auxiliary multiple-choice assessment of accumulated evidence with the host agent's execution state. From complete native trajectories, we construct a cost-aware target that compares answering now with stopping later along the same search path, accounting jointly for answer correctness and the full cost of continued reasoning. A lightweight Ridge regressor learns this decision gap and produces STOP/CONTINUE decisions. We evaluate three vision-language models with VideoSeek and AVP. On Video-MME, end-to-end accuracy changes by +0.67 percentage points on average while CASE reduces model-token use by 53.63%. The same frozen policies then transfer zero-shot to LongVideoBench and MLVU, with end-to-end accuracy changes of +3.38 and +4.58 points while saving 58.78% and 51.28% of model tokens, respectively. Across all agent-model-benchmark combinations, CASE attains the highest accuracy-efficiency Pareto-frontier coverage among the compared stopping methods (83.3%) at the selected operating points. Online execution preserves this favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off and additionally reduces measured runtime by 54.1% on average. CASE provides a plug-in termination framework for long-video reasoning agents, enabling them to decide when further evidence acquisition is no longer worthwhile.
Optimization causes uneven confidence in multimodal learning models
Confidence Falls Short: Asymmetric Certainty Gains from Optimization Hinder Multimodal Classification
Abstract: Multimodal learning (MML) falls into the optimization dilemma due to the modality imbalance phenomenon, leading to suboptimal overall performance in practice. While many attempts primarily focus on balancing the optimization dynamics across modalities to address this issue, we identify a subtle yet critical flaw: optimization yields asymmetric gains in predictive certainty, with the strong modality more confident than the weak one, driving imbalanced modality contributions. In this paper, our analysis reveals that this flaw stems from unimodal characteristics rather than multimodal learning, and this confidence discrepancy can be corrected by positive cross-modal intervention. Based on this insight, we propose multimodal Max Confidence Regularization (MaxCR) to dynamically intervene in modality semantic confidence. Specifically, the semantic confidence of each modality is tracked using a nonlinear sparsity measure. We then design max suppression and max excitation based on this measure to regularize strong and weak modalities, respectively. They penalize and encourage the top-1 confidence, thereby constraining multimodal prediction. To this end, strong and weak modalities are expected to make calibrated confidence, thereby improving the overall performance. Empirical experiments on widely used datasets reveal the superiority of our method through comparison with various state-of-the-art (SOTA) multimodal learning baselines.
Modular pipeline improves comparing audio visual deepfake detectors
DFD-Lab: A Modular Audio-Visual Deepfake Detection Pipeline
Abstract: Comparing audio-visual deepfake detectors requires coordinating dataset adaptation, temporal input representation, model interfaces and experimental conditions. We present DFD-Lab, a modular pipeline that separates these responsibilities while supporting shared training and evaluation workflows. We integrate three implementations: Xception-based maximum-logit fusion, ResNet with temporal LSTM fusion, and our AVFF reimplementation. Experiments cover external testing, degradation-based training augmentation and evaluation-time corruption. On a filtered subset of Deepfake-Eval-2024, models trained on FakeAVCeleb attain baseline AUROC values of 0.504, 0.538 and 0.458. JPEG50 training augmentation raises these to 0.691, 0.605 and 0.570, respectively, while all three accuracies decrease. These results illustrate why training interventions, evaluation corruptions and metric-dependent outcomes should remain distinct within a common pipeline. The contribution is the integration of audio-visual processing, interchangeable detectors and configurable experimental workflows, supported by empirical case studies. The findings highlight the challenge of cross-dataset detection and the complementary information provided by ranking and classification metrics.
Concept risk auditing helps govern image generation models safely
Concept-Level Risk and Calibration for Governance in Diffusion Foundation Models
Abstract: Diffusion models have become a core paradigm for multimedia generation, offering powerful concept-driven controllability for personalization, semantic editing, and selective unlearning. However, as semantic control extends beyond natural-language prompts to learned embeddings and intervention pipelines, the safety and governance of these systems become increasingly difficult to evaluate in a unified manner, especially for safety-sensitive, identity-linked, and other privacy-relevant concepts. Existing studies mainly rely on heuristic audits, adversarial probing, or task-specific erasure benchmarks, and therefore provide limited support for systematic comparison across models, conditioning channels, and deployment conditions. We present a concept-level probabilistic audit and reporting framework for diffusion models. We formalize governance-relevant concept behaviors as Bernoulli semantic events induced by stochastic generation, and define a Concept Risk Operator that maps model-channel configurations to structured risk profiles, enabling comparison across prompting interfaces, learned embedding channels, models, and recorded conditions. We apply sample-level post-hoc calibration and configuration-level risk aggregation, and show that probability error can change thresholded actions near policy boundaries. Experiments on SD1.5, SD2.1, and SDXL reveal consistent yet non-uniform operational risk patterns across concept families, channels, recorded conditions, and shifted protocols. In particular, embedding-based access and obfuscated prompts expose risks often understated by standard-prompt evaluation. A pooled multi-protocol calibrator improves held-out probability reliability, but we do not claim transfer from a standard-only calibrator. CLRC provides a common audit schema for probabilistic and decision-aware governance of multimedia generation systems.