A unified Benchmark for Multi-Frame Image Restoration under Severe Refractive Warping

Video sequence capturing through refractive dynamic media, such as a turbulent air or water surface, often suffer from severe geometric distortions and temporal instability. While recent advances address mild atmospheric turbulence, no existing benchmarks systematically evaluate restoration methods under strong and highly nonuniform refractive conditions. We present a comprehensive benchmark for geometric distortion removal in video, covering a range from turbulence-like mild warping to strong discontinuous refractive deformations. The benchmark includes both laboratory-captured real data and synthetic sequences generated for static scenes via physics-based light refraction modeling across four distortion levels and multiple surface wave types. We evaluate a spectrum of methods from simple baselines and classical registration algorithms to advanced learning-based approaches including DATUM and our proposed diffusion based V-cache for high and extreme distortions regimes. Evaluation uses both pixel-level (PSNR, SSIM), and perceptual (LPIPS, DINO, CLIP) metrics providing the first large scale analysis of geometric distortion removal. Our benchmark establishes a new foundation for developing and evaluating algorithms capable of reconstructing video from highly distorted optical environments. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/iafoss/refractive-mfir-benchmark.

SciEv: Finding Scientific Evidence Papers for Scientific News

In the past decade, many scientific news media that report scientific breakthroughs and discoveries emerged, bringing science and technology closer to the general public. However, not all scientific news article cites proper sources, such as original scientific papers. A portion of scientific news articles contain misinterpreted, exaggerated, or distorted information that deviates from facts asserted in the original papers. Manually identifying proper citations is laborious and costly. Therefore, it is necessary to automatically search for pertinent scientific papers that could be used as evidence for a given piece of scientific news. We propose a system called SciEv that searches for scientific evidence papers given a scientific news article. The system employs a 2-stage query paradigm with the first stage retrieving candidate papers and the second stage reranking them. The key feature of SciEv is it uses domain knowledge entities (DKEs) to find candidates in the first stage, which proved to be more effective than regular keyphrases. In the reranking stage, we explore different document representations for news articles and candidate papers. To evaluate our system, we compiled a pilot dataset consisting of 100 manually curated (news,paper) pairs from ScienceAlert and similar websites. To our best knowledge, this is the first dataset of this kind. Our experiments indicate that the transformer model performs the best for DKE extraction. The system achieves a P@1=50%, P@5=71%, and P@10=74% when it uses a TFIDF-based text representation. The transformer-based re-ranker achieves a comparable performance but costs twice as much time. We will collect more data and test the system for user experience.