Short-form video platforms like TikTok present unique challenges for misinformation detection due to their multimodal, dynamic, and noisy content. We present ShortCheck, a modular, inference-only pipeline with a user-friendly interface that automatically identifies checkworthy short-form videos to help human fact-checkers. The system integrates speech transcription, OCR, object and deepfake detection, video-to-text summarization, and claim verification. ShortCheck is validated by evaluating it on two manually annotated datasets with TikTok videos in a multilingual setting. The pipeline achieves promising results with F1-weighted score over 70\%.

Democracies rely on opposition and dissent to function, but in emerging democracies, freedom of speech is often restricted. This effect intensifies during regional conflicts. This study examines how the India-Pakistan conflict of May 2025 influenced Pakistani media coverage. Analyzing approximately 2,600 news articles from three major newspapers using a large language model (LLM), the study found that war-related reporting significantly overshadowed coverage of political opposition and dissent. These findings highlight how conflict can marginalize democratic discourse, reinforcing the need to safeguard press freedom in volatile regions.

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has blurred the line between human and AI-generated texts, raising urgent questions about academic integrity, intellectual property, and the spread of misinformation. Thus, reliable AI-text detection is needed for fair assessment to safeguard human authenticity and cultivate trust in digital communication. In this study, we investigate how well current machine learning (ML) approaches can distinguish ChatGPT-3.5-generated texts from human-written texts employing a labeled data set of 250 pairs of abstracts from a wide range of research topics. We test and compare both classical (Logistic Regression armed with classical Bag-of-Words, POS, and TF-IDF features) and transformer-based (BERT augmented with N-grams, DistilBERT, BERT with a lightweight custom classifier, and LSTM-based N-gram models) ML detection techniques. As we aim to assess each model's performance in detecting AI-generated research texts, we also aim to test whether an ensemble of these models can outperform any single detector. Results show DistilBERT achieves the overall best performance, while Logistic Regression and BERT-Custom offer solid, balanced alternatives; LSTM- and BERT-N-gram approaches lag. The max voting ensemble of the three best models fails to surpass DistilBERT itself, highlighting the primacy of a single transformer-based representation over mere model diversity. By comprehensively assessing the strengths and weaknesses of these AI-text detection approaches, this work lays a foundation for more robust transformer frameworks with larger, richer datasets to keep pace with ever-improving generative AI models.

Recent advances in generative modeling enable image editing assistants that follow natural language instructions without additional user input. Their supervised training requires millions of triplets (original image, instruction, edited image), yet mining pixel-accurate examples is hard. Each edit must affect only prompt-specified regions, preserve stylistic coherence, respect physical plausibility, and retain visual appeal. The lack of robust automated edit-quality metrics hinders reliable automation at scale. We present an automated, modular pipeline that mines high-fidelity triplets across domains, resolutions, instruction complexities, and styles. Built on public generative models and running without human intervention, our system uses a task-tuned Gemini validator to score instruction adherence and aesthetics directly, removing any need for segmentation or grounding models. Inversion and compositional bootstrapping enlarge the mined set by approx. 2.6x, enabling large-scale high-fidelity training data. By automating the most repetitive annotation steps, the approach allows a new scale of training without human labeling effort. To democratize research in this resource-intensive area, we release NHR-Edit, an open dataset of 720k high-quality triplets, curated at industrial scale via millions of guided generations and validator passes, and we analyze the pipeline's stage-wise survival rates, providing a framework for estimating computational effort across different model stacks. In the largest cross-dataset evaluation, it surpasses all public alternatives. We also release Bagel-NHR-Edit, a fine-tuned Bagel model with state-of-the-art metrics.

Despite remarkable progress in Text-to-Image models, many real-world applications require generating coherent image sets with diverse consistency requirements. Existing consistent methods often focus on a specific domain with specific aspects of consistency, which significantly constrains their generalizability to broader applications. In this paper, we propose a more challenging problem, Text-to-ImageSet (T2IS) generation, which aims to generate sets of images that meet various consistency requirements based on user instructions. To systematically study this problem, we first introduce $\textbf{T2IS-Bench}$ with 596 diverse instructions across 26 subcategories, providing comprehensive coverage for T2IS generation. Building on this, we propose $\textbf{T2IS-Eval}$, an evaluation framework that transforms user instructions into multifaceted assessment criteria and employs effective evaluators to adaptively assess consistency fulfillment between criteria and generated sets. Subsequently, we propose $\textbf{AutoT2IS}$, a training-free framework that maximally leverages pretrained Diffusion Transformers' in-context capabilities to harmonize visual elements to satisfy both image-level prompt alignment and set-level visual consistency. Extensive experiments on T2IS-Bench reveal that diverse consistency challenges all existing methods, while our AutoT2IS significantly outperforms current generalized and even specialized approaches. Our method also demonstrates the ability to enable numerous underexplored real-world applications, confirming its substantial practical value. Visit our project in https://chengyou-jia.github.io/T2IS-Home.

Recent large language models (LLMs) have made great progress in the field of text-to-speech (TTS), but they still face major challenges in synthesizing fine-grained emotional speech in an interpretable manner. Traditional methods rely on discrete emotion labels to control emotion categories and intensities, which cannot capture the complexity and continuity of human emotional perception and expression. The lack of large-scale emotional speech datasets with balanced emotion distributions and fine-grained emotional annotations often causes overfitting in synthesis models and impedes effective emotion control. To address these issues, we propose UDDETTS, a universal LLM framework unifying discrete and dimensional emotions for controllable emotional TTS. This model introduces the interpretable Arousal-Dominance-V alence (ADV) space for dimensional emotion description and supports emotion control driven by either discrete emotion labels or nonlinearly quantified ADV values. Furthermore, a semi-supervised training strategy is designed to comprehensively utilize diverse speech datasets with different types of emotional annotations to train the UDDETTS. Experiments show that UDDETTS achieves linear emotion control along three interpretable dimensions, and exhibits superior end-to-end emotional speech synthesis capabilities. Code and demos are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/ It is designed for large-scale emotional speech datasets and integrates discrete label and dimensional ADV annotations to enable controllable emotional TTS. These models leverage the strong language understanding of LLMs to generate speech semantic tokens from text tokens, thereby achieving significant advantages in synthesizing expressive speech. Current LLM-based methods primarily rely on emotion prompts for supervised fine-tuning.

Facing scaling laws, video data from the internet becomes increasingly important. However, collecting extensive videos that meet specific needs is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this work, we study the way to expedite this collection process and propose VC-Agent, the first interactive agent that is able to understand users' queries and feedback, and accordingly retrieve/scale up relevant video clips with minimal user input. Specifically, considering the user interface, our agent defines various user-friendly ways for the user to specify requirements based on textual descriptions and confirmations. As for agent functions, we leverage existing multi-modal large language models to connect the user's requirements with the video content. More importantly, we propose two novel filtering policies that can be updated when user interaction is continually performed. Finally, we provide a new benchmark for personalized video dataset collection, and carefully conduct the user study to verify our agent's usage in various real scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our agent for customized video dataset collection. Project page: https://allenyidan.github.io/vcagent_page/.

The widespread use of human-like text from Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates the development of robust detection systems. However, progress is limited by a critical lack of suitable training data; existing datasets are often generated with outdated models, are predominantly in English, and fail to address the increasingly common scenario of mixed human-AI authorship. Crucially, while some datasets address mixed authorship, none provide the character-level annotations required for the precise localization of AI-generated segments within a text. To address these gaps, we introduce LLMTrace, a new large-scale, bilingual (English and Russian) corpus for AI-generated text detection. Constructed using a diverse range of modern proprietary and open-source LLMs, our dataset is designed to support two key tasks: traditional full-text binary classification (human vs. AI) and the novel task of AI-generated interval detection, facilitated by character-level annotations. We believe LLMTrace will serve as a vital resource for training and evaluating the next generation of more nuanced and practical AI detection models. The project page is available at \href{https://sweetdream779.github.io/LLMTrace-info/}{iitolstykh/LLMTrace}.

The ultimate goal of expressive speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) is to accurately translate spoken content while preserving the speaker identity and emotional style. However, progress in this field is largely hindered by three key challenges: the scarcity of paired speech data that retains expressive styles, the complexity of multi-stage processing pipelines, and the limited transfer of translation capabilities from large language models (LLMs). In this work, we address these challenges by introducing UniSS, a novel single-stage framework for expressive S2ST. Our approach features carefully designed speech semantic and style modeling, enabling seamless integration with existing text-based LLM frameworks to develop a unified text-speech language model. To transfer translation capabilities from text to speech, we propose a cross-modal chain-of-thought prompting process that progressively aligns audio semantics with text and ensures style preservation in the decoded results. Furthermore, we construct and release a large-scale, high-quality expressive S2ST dataset, UniST, comprising 44.8k hours of data. Experimental results show that UniSS significantly outperforms previous methods in translation fidelity and speech quality while preserving voice, emotion, and duration consistency. Our work establishes a simpler and more effective paradigm for building the next generation of expressive S2ST systems. Audio samples are available at https://cmots.github.io/uniss-demo.

The rapid progress of image generative AI has blurred the boundary between synthetic and real images, fueling an arms race between generators and discriminators. This paper investigates the conditions under which discriminators are most disadvantaged in this competition. We analyze two key factors: data dimensionality and data complexity. While increased dimensionality often strengthens the discriminators ability to detect subtle inconsistencies, complexity introduces a more nuanced effect. Using Kolmogorov complexity as a measure of intrinsic dataset structure, we show that both very simple and highly complex datasets reduce the detectability of synthetic images; generators can learn simple datasets almost perfectly, whereas extreme diversity masks imperfections. In contrast, intermediate-complexity datasets create the most favorable conditions for detection, as generators fail to fully capture the distribution and their errors remain visible.