Research radar¶
A weekly look at public video-quality research, so that a metric, dataset or standard that matters to VMAFx is noticed within a week and ends up as a tracked issue instead of a stray link. The decision and its alternatives are in ADR-2171. The recurring epic that links each weekly sweep is #2395.
What is watched¶
sources.yaml is the registry. It lists public sources only: GitHub organisations and repositories, arXiv and OpenAlex queries, standards-body document lists, conference proceedings and datasets. An entry names a source and says why it matters and what is known about its licence; it never describes a person.
| Kind | Read by | What the weekly run reports |
|---|---|---|
github_owner | collector | new repositories, releases, pushes |
github_repo | collector | releases, pushes (releases_only drops pushes) |
arxiv_query | collector | papers submitted in the window |
openalex_query | collector | works published in the window (title and abstract match) |
manual | triage lane | standards documents, proceedings and datasets; no machine-readable feed |
To add a source, append an entry to sources.yaml (the fields are described in its header) and run the tests:
Cadence¶
The workflow research-radar.yml runs every Monday at 06:00 UTC on a hosted runner and files one issue labelled research-radar, titled Research radar digest <year>-W<week>. It runs scripts/research/radar_collect.py, which uses no model and keeps no state: the digest covers the seven days before the run, and consecutive weeks partition time exactly. Nothing changed means no issue. A source that could not be read is listed in the digest. To run it by hand:
GITHUB_TOKEN="$(gh auth token)" python3 scripts/research/radar_collect.py \
--days 7 --output /tmp/digest.md
--days takes 1 to 366 and --now fixes the window end (useful to rebuild an old week).
Triage¶
An agent lane works through each digest issue and the manual sources, as written in triage.md: every item gets one class, a licence class and a patent note, and becomes a comment on an existing issue or a new issue in the right milestone.
| Class | Meaning | Where it lands |
|---|---|---|
have | VMAFx already covers it | nothing, or a note on the existing issue |
oracle | a reference implementation to compare against | RC7 reference conformance (#2286) |
metric | a candidate new metric | milestone 1.3, New metrics |
data | a dataset or a method for A/B and training | milestone 1.4 |
next-gen | input for the next model generation | milestone 1.5 |
watch | relevant but not actionable yet | the research watch (#2168) or the epic |
skip | not relevant | nothing |
Licence gate¶
Nothing from a source enters the tree because it was found by the radar. The licence class decides what may happen to its code:
| Licence class | Meaning | Allowed |
|---|---|---|
permissive | MIT, BSD, Apache and similar | port directly with the notice the licence requires, or use as an oracle |
copyleft | GPL and similar | oracle only; never linked or copied |
custom | a bespoke or partial notice | read the text first; oracle only until it is read |
none | no licence file | oracle run locally; clean-room re-implementation; ask the authors for a licence |
Oracle use means running the original locally to compare numbers; its code and its model files are never vendored or shipped. A clean-room implementation is written from the paper without reading the source, after a patent check. Details and the VMAFx implementation shape are in triage.md.