AIarXiv

Ranked by formulaVerdict: Notable

AV-FABLE: Audio-Visual Manipulation Forensics in Long-Form Videos

Localized AI manipulations in long-form videos often affect brief events within otherwise authentic content, making video-level classification insufficient for forensic analysis.

By Huang, Au, Hou +8

Score█████░░░░░4.6

Key numbers

  • 998 hours

Caveats

  • Preprint; not yet peer reviewed.

VerdictWorth a reader's time today.

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Abstract

Localized AI manipulations in long-form videos often affect brief events within otherwise authentic content, making video-level classification insufficient for forensic analysis. Existing audio-visual deepfake benchmarks largely focus on short talking-head clips, while long-form temporal forensics remains predominantly visual. We introduce AV-FABLE, a dual-timeline benchmark for sparse manipulations in open-scene long-form audio-visual videos. AV-FABLE contains 16,650 pristine--manipulated twin pairs (998 hours) created with 27 editing configurations, with separate audio and visual timelines that enable modality-specific temporal localization and expose errors hidden by joint-timeline evaluation. On AV-FABLE, zero-shot prompting of audio-visual large language models (AV-LLMs) yields near-chance detection and poor temporal localization. In contrast, supervised readouts of their frozen perception features recover strong forensic signals, suggesting manipulation evidence is encoded in these representations but not effectively exposed through language outputs. Motivated by this observation, we propose NFSR(Native Forensics via Separated Readouts), which reads frozen AV-LLM features with separate audio and visual temporal decoders. NFSR achieves the best audio-visual localization performance in-domain and across all three out-of-distribution settings, including transfer to held-out videos from an external long-video forensic benchmark. AV-FABLE, code, and model weights will be publicly released.

Yuesheng Huang, Hoi Fan Au, Jiaqi Hou, Ruicheng Zhang, Jiarui He, Haocheng Yang, Bin Hu, Kewei Zhang, Weijian Deng, Jun Zhou, Xiu Li

The editor's rubric

Heuristic review

Leverage4 / 5
A general-purpose tool used across several fields (Adam, ResNet, LoRA, next-generation sequencing).
24% of this desk’s rubric
Magnitude2 / 5
Solid incremental gain on a meaningful problem.
18% of this desk’s rubric
Evidence3 / 5
Solid: multiple benchmarks or cohorts, ablations, fair baselines, released code or data.
14% of this desk’s rubric
Novelty2 / 5
A new combination of known ideas.
16% of this desk’s rubric
Trajectory2 / 5
Some room to improve with obvious engineering.
18% of this desk’s rubric
Stakes2 / 5
Benefits a professional community (practitioners, clinicians, engineers).
10% of this desk’s rubric

Editor’s rationale

Heuristic triage from title and abstract text only, not a reading of the paper. Cues found: method (we propose); breadth (zero/few-shot); verification (held-out test, code released); stakes (general AI).

How the score was computed

rank-2026-10-18

Score█████░░░░░4.6

Score = 10 × (65% × adjusted merit / 10 + 25% × attention + 10% × freshness)

Desks place stronger verdicts first, then use this score to order work within the same verdict.

Merit
5.2 / 10
Weighted rubric, evidence-gated.
Adjusted merit
4.5 / 10
Shrunk toward the desk prior by editor confidence (38%).
Attention
53%
Citations, upvotes, points, mentions.
Freshness
38%
Half-life decay since publication.
  • Hugging Face upvotes22 (reference 25, via hf-daily, Oct 27, 2026, 13:49 UTC)

The record

  • Reviewed by heuristic-v10 on Oct 27, 2026, 01:36 UTC. Paper type: method.
  • Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM
  • TOP, No.4 in the Artificial Intelligence edition of October 27, 2026.