Ahead of the Spread: Agent-Driven Virtual Propagation for Early Fake News Detection

Early detection of fake news is critical for mitigating its rapid dissemination on social media, which can severely undermine public trust and social stability. Recent advancements show that incorporating propagation dynamics can significantly enhance detection performance compared to previous content-only approaches. However, this remains challenging at early stages due to the absence of observable propagation signals. To address this limitation, we propose AVOID, an \underline{a}gent-driven \underline{v}irtual pr\underline{o}pagat\underline{i}on for early fake news \underline{d}etection. AVOID reformulates early detection as a new paradigm of evidence generation, where propagation signals are actively simulated rather than passively observed. Leveraging LLM-powered agents with differentiated roles and data-driven personas, AVOID realistically constructs early-stage diffusion behaviors without requiring real propagation data. The resulting virtual trajectories provide complementary social evidence that enriches content-based detection, while a denoising-guided fusion strategy aligns simulated propagation with content semantics. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that AVOID consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the effectiveness and practical value of virtual propagation augmentation for early fake news detection. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Ironychen/AVOID.

Energy-based Periodicity Mining with Deep Features for Action Repetition Counting in Unconstrained Videos

Action repetition counting is to estimate the occurrence times of the repetitive motion in one action, which is a relatively new, important but challenging measurement problem. To solve this problem, we propose a new method superior to the traditional ways in two aspects, without preprocessing and applicable for arbitrary periodicity actions. Without preprocessing, the proposed model makes our method convenient for real applications; processing the arbitrary periodicity action makes our model more suitable for the actual circumstance. In terms of methodology, firstly, we analyze the movement patterns of the repetitive actions based on the spatial and temporal features of actions extracted by deep ConvNets; Secondly, the Principal Component Analysis algorithm is used to generate the intuitive periodic information from the chaotic high-dimensional deep features; Thirdly, the periodicity is mined based on the high-energy rule using Fourier transform; Finally, the inverse Fourier transform with a multi-stage threshold filter is proposed to improve the quality of the mined periodicity, and peak detection is introduced to finish the repetition counting. Our work features two-fold: 1) An important insight that deep features extracted for action recognition can well model the self-similarity periodicity of the repetitive action is presented. 2) A high-energy based periodicity mining rule using deep features is presented, which can process arbitrary actions without preprocessing. Experimental results show that our method achieves comparable results on the public datasets YT Segments and QUVA.