Daily Papers

The proliferation of fake news on digital platforms has underscored the need for robust and scalable detection mechanisms. Traditional methods often fall short in handling large and diverse datasets due to limitations in scalability and accuracy. In this paper, we propose NexusIndex, a novel framework and model that enhances fake news detection by integrating advanced language models, an innovative FAISSNexusIndex layer, and attention mechanisms. Our approach leverages multi-model embeddings to capture rich contextual and semantic nuances, significantly improving text interpretation and classification accuracy. By transforming articles into high-dimensional embeddings and indexing them efficiently, NexusIndex facilitates rapid similarity searches across extensive collections of news articles. The FAISSNexusIndex layer further optimizes this process, enabling real-time detection and enhancing the system's scalability and performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that NexusIndex outperforms state-of-the-art methods in efficiency and accuracy across diverse datasets.

Vector databases manage large collections of embedding vectors. As AI applications are growing rapidly, so are the number of embeddings that need to be stored and indexed. The Faiss library is dedicated to vector similarity search, a core functionality of vector databases. Faiss is a toolkit of indexing methods and related primitives used to search, cluster, compress and transform vectors. This paper first describes the tradeoff space of vector search, then the design principles of Faiss in terms of structure, approach to optimization and interfacing. We benchmark key features of the library and discuss a few selected applications to highlight its broad applicability.

Generating high-quality, multi-layer transparent images from text prompts can unlock a new level of creative control, allowing users to edit each layer as effortlessly as editing text outputs from LLMs. However, the development of multi-layer generative models lags behind that of conventional text-to-image models due to the absence of a large, high-quality corpus of multi-layer transparent data. In this paper, we address this fundamental challenge by: (i) releasing the first open, ultra-high-fidelity PrismLayers (PrismLayersPro) dataset of 200K (20K) multilayer transparent images with accurate alpha mattes, (ii) introducing a trainingfree synthesis pipeline that generates such data on demand using off-the-shelf diffusion models, and (iii) delivering a strong, open-source multi-layer generation model, ART+, which matches the aesthetics of modern text-to-image generation models. The key technical contributions include: LayerFLUX, which excels at generating high-quality single transparent layers with accurate alpha mattes, and MultiLayerFLUX, which composes multiple LayerFLUX outputs into complete images, guided by human-annotated semantic layout. To ensure higher quality, we apply a rigorous filtering stage to remove artifacts and semantic mismatches, followed by human selection. Fine-tuning the state-of-the-art ART model on our synthetic PrismLayersPro yields ART+, which outperforms the original ART in 60% of head-to-head user study comparisons and even matches the visual quality of images generated by the FLUX.1-[dev] model. We anticipate that our work will establish a solid dataset foundation for the multi-layer transparent image generation task, enabling research and applications that require precise, editable, and visually compelling layered imagery.

This paper proposes Pix2Next, a novel image-to-image translation framework designed to address the challenge of generating high-quality Near-Infrared (NIR) images from RGB inputs. Our approach leverages a state-of-the-art Vision Foundation Model (VFM) within an encoder-decoder architecture, incorporating cross-attention mechanisms to enhance feature integration. This design captures detailed global representations and preserves essential spectral characteristics, treating RGB-to-NIR translation as more than a simple domain transfer problem. A multi-scale PatchGAN discriminator ensures realistic image generation at various detail levels, while carefully designed loss functions couple global context understanding with local feature preservation. We performed experiments on the RANUS dataset to demonstrate Pix2Next's advantages in quantitative metrics and visual quality, improving the FID score by 34.81% compared to existing methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical utility of Pix2Next by showing improved performance on a downstream object detection task using generated NIR data to augment limited real NIR datasets. The proposed approach enables the scaling up of NIR datasets without additional data acquisition or annotation efforts, potentially accelerating advancements in NIR-based computer vision applications.

We present NeX, a new approach to novel view synthesis based on enhancements of multiplane image (MPI) that can reproduce next-level view-dependent effects -- in real time. Unlike traditional MPI that uses a set of simple RGBalpha planes, our technique models view-dependent effects by instead parameterizing each pixel as a linear combination of basis functions learned from a neural network. Moreover, we propose a hybrid implicit-explicit modeling strategy that improves upon fine detail and produces state-of-the-art results. Our method is evaluated on benchmark forward-facing datasets as well as our newly-introduced dataset designed to test the limit of view-dependent modeling with significantly more challenging effects such as rainbow reflections on a CD. Our method achieves the best overall scores across all major metrics on these datasets with more than 1000times faster rendering time than the state of the art. For real-time demos, visit https://nex-mpi.github.io/

Accurate medical image segmentation is essential for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. While recent interactive foundation models (e.g., nnInteractive) enhance generalization through large-scale multimodal pretraining, they still depend on precise prompts and often perform below expectations in contexts that are underrepresented in their training data. We present AtlasSegFM, an atlas-guided framework that customizes available foundation models to clinical contexts with a single annotated example. The core innovations are: 1) a pipeline that provides context-aware prompts for foundation models via registration between a context atlas and query images, and 2) a test-time adapter to fuse predictions from both atlas registration and the foundation model. Extensive experiments across public and in-house datasets spanning multiple modalities and organs demonstrate that AtlasSegFM consistently improves segmentation, particularly for small, delicate structures. AtlasSegFM provides a lightweight, deployable solution one-shot customization of foundation models in real-world clinical workflows. The code will be made publicly available.

We propose a fully convolutional one-stage object detector (FCOS) to solve object detection in a per-pixel prediction fashion, analogue to semantic segmentation. Almost all state-of-the-art object detectors such as RetinaNet, SSD, YOLOv3, and Faster R-CNN rely on pre-defined anchor boxes. In contrast, our proposed detector FCOS is anchor box free, as well as proposal free. By eliminating the predefined set of anchor boxes, FCOS completely avoids the complicated computation related to anchor boxes such as calculating overlapping during training. More importantly, we also avoid all hyper-parameters related to anchor boxes, which are often very sensitive to the final detection performance. With the only post-processing non-maximum suppression (NMS), FCOS with ResNeXt-64x4d-101 achieves 44.7% in AP with single-model and single-scale testing, surpassing previous one-stage detectors with the advantage of being much simpler. For the first time, we demonstrate a much simpler and flexible detection framework achieving improved detection accuracy. We hope that the proposed FCOS framework can serve as a simple and strong alternative for many other instance-level tasks. Code is available at:Code is available at: https://tinyurl.com/FCOSv1

Routine visual inspections of concrete structures are imperative for upholding the safety and integrity of critical infrastructure. Such visual inspections sometimes happen under low-light conditions, e.g., checking for bridge health. Crack segmentation under such conditions is challenging due to the poor contrast between cracks and their surroundings. However, most deep learning methods are designed for well-illuminated crack images and hence their performance drops dramatically in low-light scenes. In addition, conventional approaches require many annotated low-light crack images which is time-consuming. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing CrackNex, a framework that utilizes reflectance information based on Retinex Theory to help the model learn a unified illumination-invariant representation. Furthermore, we utilize few-shot segmentation to solve the inefficient training data problem. In CrackNex, both a support prototype and a reflectance prototype are extracted from the support set. Then, a prototype fusion module is designed to integrate the features from both prototypes. CrackNex outperforms the SOTA methods on multiple datasets. Additionally, we present the first benchmark dataset, LCSD, for low-light crack segmentation. LCSD consists of 102 well-illuminated crack images and 41 low-light crack images. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/zy1296/CrackNex.