Mamba2 Meets Silence: Robust Vocal Source Separation for Sparse Regions

We introduce a new music source separation model tailored for accurate vocal isolation. Unlike Transformer-based approaches, which often fail to capture intermittently occurring vocals, our model leverages Mamba2, a recent state space model, to better capture long-range temporal dependencies. To handle long input sequences efficiently, we combine a band-splitting strategy with a dual-path architecture. Experiments show that our approach outperforms recent state-of-the-art models, achieving a cSDR of 11.03 dB-the best reported to date-and delivering substantial gains in uSDR. Moreover, the model exhibits stable and consistent performance across varying input lengths and vocal occurrence patterns. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Mamba-based models for high-resolution audio processing and open up new directions for broader applications in audio research.

VLCounter: Text-aware Visual Representation for Zero-Shot Object Counting

Zero-Shot Object Counting (ZSOC) aims to count referred instances of arbitrary classes in a query image without human-annotated exemplars. To deal with ZSOC, preceding studies proposed a two-stage pipeline: discovering exemplars and counting. However, there remains a challenge of vulnerability to error propagation of the sequentially designed two-stage process. In this work, an one-stage baseline, Visual-Language Baseline (VLBase), exploring the implicit association of the semantic-patch embeddings of CLIP is proposed. Subsequently, the extension of VLBase to Visual-language Counter (VLCounter) is achieved by incorporating three modules devised to tailor VLBase for object counting. First, Semantic-conditioned Prompt Tuning (SPT) is introduced within the image encoder to acquire target-highlighted representations. Second, Learnable Affine Transformation (LAT) is employed to translate the semantic-patch similarity map to be appropriate for the counting task. Lastly, the layer-wisely encoded features are transferred to the decoder through Segment-aware Skip Connection (SaSC) to keep the generalization capability for unseen classes. Through extensive experiments on FSC147, CARPK, and PUCPR+, the benefits of the end-to-end framework, VLCounter, are demonstrated.