Role-play has become a key testbed for generative models, expanding from text-only dialogue to multimodal interaction. Extending role-play to speech captures prosody, emotion, and delivery, but also poses new evaluation challenges. Current pipelines often use audio large language models (ALLMs) as zero-shot judges, which miss paralinguistic cues, collapse multiple aspects into coarse scores, and rely on synthetic speech references that fail to reflect real-world roles. We present Speech-DRAME, a unified framework that contributes at three levels: (i) Speech-DRAME-EvalBench, an evaluation benchmark with bilingual human-annotated data and protocols for training and testing speech evaluation models (SEMs), (ii) DRAME-Eval, a fine-tuned evaluation model, which substantially outperforms zero-shot and few-shot ALLMs, and (iii) Speech-DRAME-RoleBench, a speech role-play benchmark that leverages DRAME-Eval as an automatic judge to compare speech foundation models (SFMs). Speech-DRAME distinguishes between two complementary evaluation strategies: Archetype Evaluation, a top-down approach measuring adherence to broad role archetypes, and Realism Evaluation, a bottom-up approach grounded in real human speech that emphasizes nuanced role quality. Compared to zero-shot ALLM judges, DRAME-Eval achieves stronger agreement with human ratings (Pearson correlation from 0.480 to 0.629 in archetypes, and 0.390 to 0.625 in realism). By integrating transparent benchmark resources, modeling approaches, and system-level evaluation, Speech-DRAME provides the first comprehensive, reproducible foundation for assessing spoken role-play.

The rapid spread of fake news threatens social stability and public trust, rendering its detection an imperative research priority. Although large language models (LLMs) excel at numerous natural language processing tasks with their remarkable contextual understanding and extensive prior knowledge, the time-bounded knowledge coverage and tendency for generating hallucination content reduce their reliability when handling fast-evolving news streams. Furthermore, models trained on existing static datasets also often lack the generalization needed for emerging news topics. To address these challenges, we propose ZoFia, a novel two-stage zero-shot fake news detection framework. First, we introduce Hierarchical Salience to quantify the importance of entities in the news content, and propose the SC-MMR algorithm to effectively select an informative and diverse set of keywords that serve as queries for retrieving up-to-date external evidence. Subsequently, a multi LLM interactive system, in which each agent assumes a distinct role, performs multi-view collaborative analysis and adversarial debate over the news text and its related information, and finally produces an interpretable and robust judgment. Comprehensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that ZoFia obviously outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and most of few-shot methods. Our codes will be open-sourced to facilitate related communities.

This research explores the evolution of the detective archetype in French detective fiction through computational analysis. Using quantitative methods and character-level embeddings, we show that a supervised model is able to capture the unity of the detective archetype across 150 years of literature, from M. Lecoq (1866) to Commissaire Adamsberg (2017). Building on this finding, the study demonstrates how the detective figure evolves from a secondary narrative role to become the central character and the "reasoning machine" [35] of the classical detective story. In the aftermath of the Second World War, with the importation of the hardboiled tradition into France, the archetype becomes more complex, navigating the genre's turn toward social violence and moral ambiguity.

The rapid rise of generative diffusion models has made distinguishing authentic visual content from synthetic imagery increasingly challenging. Traditional deepfake detection methods, which rely on frequency or pixel-level artifacts, fail against modern text-to-image systems such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E that produce photorealistic and artifact-free results. This paper introduces a diffusion-based forensic framework that leverages multi-strength image reconstruction dynamics, termed diffusion snap-back, to identify AI-generated images. By analysing how reconstruction metrics (LPIPS, SSIM, and PSNR) evolve across varying noise strengths, we extract interpretable manifold-based features that differentiate real and synthetic images. Evaluated on a balanced dataset of 4,000 images, our approach achieves 0.993 AUROC under cross-validation and remains robust to common distortions such as compression and noise. Despite using limited data and a single diffusion backbone (Stable Diffusion v1.5), the proposed method demonstrates strong generalization and interpretability, offering a foundation for scalable, model-agnostic synthetic media forensics.

We present Stable Video Materials 3D (SViM3D), a framework to predict multi-view consistent physically based rendering (PBR) materials, given a single image. Recently, video diffusion models have been successfully used to reconstruct 3D objects from a single image efficiently. However, reflectance is still represented by simple material models or needs to be estimated in additional steps to enable relighting and controlled appearance edits. We extend a latent video diffusion model to output spatially varying PBR parameters and surface normals jointly with each generated view based on explicit camera control. This unique setup allows for relighting and generating a 3D asset using our model as neural prior. We introduce various mechanisms to this pipeline that improve quality in this ill-posed setting. We show state-of-the-art relighting and novel view synthesis performance on multiple object-centric datasets. Our method generalizes to diverse inputs, enabling the generation of relightable 3D assets useful in AR/VR, movies, games and other visual media.

We present Music Arena, an open platform for scalable human preference evaluation of text-to-music (TTM) models. Soliciting human preferences via listening studies is the gold standard for evaluation in TTM, but these studies are expensive to conduct and difficult to compare, as study protocols may differ across systems. Moreover, human preferences might help researchers align their TTM systems or improve automatic evaluation metrics, but an open and renewable source of preferences does not currently exist. We aim to fill these gaps by offering *live* evaluation for TTM. In Music Arena, real-world users input text prompts of their choosing and compare outputs from two TTM systems, and their preferences are used to compile a leaderboard. While Music Arena follows recent evaluation trends in other AI domains, we also design it with key features tailored to music: an LLM-based routing system to navigate the heterogeneous type signatures of TTM systems, and the collection of *detailed* preferences including listening data and natural language feedback. We also propose a rolling data release policy with user privacy guarantees, providing a renewable source of preference data and increasing platform transparency. Through its standardized evaluation protocol, transparent data access policies, and music-specific features, Music Arena not only addresses key challenges in the TTM ecosystem but also demonstrates how live evaluation can be thoughtfully adapted to unique characteristics of specific AI domains. Music Arena is available at: https://music-arena.org . Preference data is available at: https://huggingface.co/music-arena .

Recent guidance methods in diffusion models steer reverse sampling by perturbing the model to construct an implicit weak model and guide generation away from it. Among these approaches, attention perturbation has demonstrated strong empirical performance in unconditional scenarios where classifier-free guidance is not applicable. However, existing attention perturbation methods lack principled approaches for determining where perturbations should be applied, particularly in Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architectures where quality-relevant computations are distributed across layers. In this paper, we investigate the granularity of attention perturbations, ranging from the layer level down to individual attention heads, and discover that specific heads govern distinct visual concepts such as structure, style, and texture quality. Building on this insight, we propose "HeadHunter", a systematic framework for iteratively selecting attention heads that align with user-centric objectives, enabling fine-grained control over generation quality and visual attributes. In addition, we introduce SoftPAG, which linearly interpolates each selected head's attention map toward an identity matrix, providing a continuous knob to tune perturbation strength and suppress artifacts. Our approach not only mitigates the oversmoothing issues of existing layer-level perturbation but also enables targeted manipulation of specific visual styles through compositional head selection. We validate our method on modern large-scale DiT-based text-to-image models including Stable Diffusion 3 and FLUX.1, demonstrating superior performance in both general quality enhancement and style-specific guidance. Our work provides the first head-level analysis of attention perturbation in diffusion models, uncovering interpretable specialization within attention layers and enabling practical design of effective perturbation strategies.

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This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper .

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper .