Seeing What You Say: Expressive Image Generation from Speech

This paper proposes VoxStudio, the first unified and end-to-end speech-to-image model that generates expressive images directly from spoken descriptions by jointly aligning linguistic and paralinguistic information. At its core is a speech information bottleneck (SIB) module, which compresses raw speech into compact semantic tokens, preserving prosody and emotional nuance. By operating directly on these tokens, VoxStudio eliminates the need for an additional speech-to-text system, which often ignores the hidden details beyond text, e.g., tone or emotion. We also release VoxEmoset, a large-scale paired emotional speech-image dataset built via an advanced TTS engine to affordably generate richly expressive utterances. Comprehensive experiments on the SpokenCOCO, Flickr8kAudio, and VoxEmoset benchmarks demonstrate the feasibility of our method and highlight key challenges, including emotional consistency and linguistic ambiguity, paving the way for future research.

Referee: Reference-aware Audiovisual Deepfake Detection

Since deepfakes generated by advanced generative models have rapidly posed serious threats, existing audiovisual deepfake detection approaches struggle to generalize to unseen forgeries. We propose a novel reference-aware audiovisual deepfake detection method, called Referee. Speaker-specific cues from only one-shot examples are leveraged to detect manipulations beyond spatiotemporal artifacts. By matching and aligning identity-related queries from reference and target content into cross-modal features, Referee jointly reasons about audiovisual synchrony and identity consistency. Extensive experiments on FakeAVCeleb, FaceForensics++, and KoDF demonstrate that Referee achieves state-of-the-art performance on cross-dataset and cross-language evaluation protocols. Experimental results highlight the importance of cross-modal identity verification for future deepfake detection. The code is available at https://github.com/ewha-mmai/referee.

Trans-EnV: A Framework for Evaluating the Linguistic Robustness of LLMs Against English Varieties

Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly evaluated on Standard American English (SAE), often overlooking the diversity of global English varieties. This narrow focus may raise fairness concerns as degraded performance on non-standard varieties can lead to unequal benefits for users worldwide. Therefore, it is critical to extensively evaluate the linguistic robustness of LLMs on multiple non-standard English varieties. We introduce Trans-EnV, a framework that automatically transforms SAE datasets into multiple English varieties to evaluate the linguistic robustness. Our framework combines (1) linguistics expert knowledge to curate variety-specific features and transformation guidelines from linguistic literature and corpora, and (2) LLM-based transformations to ensure both linguistic validity and scalability. Using Trans-EnV, we transform six benchmark datasets into 38 English varieties and evaluate seven state-of-the-art LLMs. Our results reveal significant performance disparities, with accuracy decreasing by up to 46.3% on non-standard varieties. These findings highlight the importance of comprehensive linguistic robustness evaluation across diverse English varieties. Each construction of Trans-EnV was validated through rigorous statistical testing and consultation with a researcher in the field of second language acquisition, ensuring its linguistic validity. Our \href{https://github.com/jiyounglee-0523/TransEnV}{code} and \href{https://huggingface.co/collections/jiyounglee0523/transenv-681eadb3c0c8cf363b363fb1}{datasets} are publicly available.

Bootstrap Your Own Views: Masked Ego-Exo Modeling for Fine-grained View-invariant Video Representations

View-invariant representation learning from egocentric (first-person, ego) and exocentric (third-person, exo) videos is a promising approach toward generalizing video understanding systems across multiple viewpoints. However, this area has been underexplored due to the substantial differences in perspective, motion patterns, and context between ego and exo views. In this paper, we propose a novel masked ego-exo modeling that promotes both causal temporal dynamics and cross-view alignment, called Bootstrap Your Own Views (BYOV), for fine-grained view-invariant video representation learning from unpaired ego-exo videos. We highlight the importance of capturing the compositional nature of human actions as a basis for robust cross-view understanding. Specifically, self-view masking and cross-view masking predictions are designed to learn view-invariant and powerful representations concurrently. Experimental results demonstrate that our BYOV significantly surpasses existing approaches with notable gains across all metrics in four downstream ego-exo video tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/park-jungin/byov.

Single Ground Truth Is Not Enough: Add Linguistic Variability to Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Evaluation

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is the challenging task of extracting sentiment along with its corresponding aspects and opinions from human language. Due to the inherent variability of natural language, aspect and opinion terms can be expressed in various surface forms, making their accurate identification complex. Current evaluation methods for this task often restrict answers to a single ground truth, penalizing semantically equivalent predictions that differ in surface form. To address this limitation, we propose a novel, fully automated pipeline that augments existing test sets with alternative valid responses for aspect and opinion terms. This approach enables a fairer assessment of language models by accommodating linguistic diversity, resulting in higher human agreement than single-answer test sets (up to 10%p improvement in Kendall's Tau score). Our experimental results demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) show substantial performance improvements over T5 models when evaluated using our augmented test set, suggesting that LLMs' capabilities in ABSA tasks may have been underestimated. This work contributes to a more comprehensive evaluation framework for ABSA, potentially leading to more accurate assessments of model performance in information extraction tasks, particularly those involving span extraction.

Read, Watch and Scream! Sound Generation from Text and Video

Multimodal generative models have shown impressive advances with the help of powerful diffusion models. Despite the progress, generating sound solely from text poses challenges in ensuring comprehensive scene depiction and temporal alignment. Meanwhile, video-to-sound generation limits the flexibility to prioritize sound synthesis for specific objects within the scene. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel video-and-text-to-sound generation method, called ReWaS, where video serves as a conditional control for a text-to-audio generation model. Our method estimates the structural information of audio (namely, energy) from the video while receiving key content cues from a user prompt. We employ a well-performing text-to-sound model to consolidate the video control, which is much more efficient for training multimodal diffusion models with massive triplet-paired (audio-video-text) data. In addition, by separating the generative components of audio, it becomes a more flexible system that allows users to freely adjust the energy, surrounding environment, and primary sound source according to their preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that our method shows superiority in terms of quality, controllability, and training efficiency. Our demo is available at https://naver-ai.github.io/rewas

Bridging Vision and Language Spaces with Assignment Prediction

This paper introduces VLAP, a novel approach that bridges pretrained vision models and large language models (LLMs) to make frozen LLMs understand the visual world. VLAP transforms the embedding space of pretrained vision models into the LLMs' word embedding space using a single linear layer for efficient and general-purpose visual and language understanding. Specifically, we harness well-established word embeddings to bridge two modality embedding spaces. The visual and text representations are simultaneously assigned to a set of word embeddings within pretrained LLMs by formulating the assigning procedure as an optimal transport problem. We predict the assignment of one modality from the representation of another modality data, enforcing consistent assignments for paired multimodal data. This allows vision and language representations to contain the same information, grounding the frozen LLMs' word embedding space in visual data. Moreover, a robust semantic taxonomy of LLMs can be preserved with visual data since the LLMs interpret and reason linguistic information from correlations between word embeddings. Experimental results show that VLAP achieves substantial improvements over the previous linear transformation-based approaches across a range of vision-language tasks, including image captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. We also demonstrate the learned visual representations hold a semantic taxonomy of LLMs, making visual semantic arithmetic possible.

KorNAT: LLM Alignment Benchmark for Korean Social Values and Common Knowledge

For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be effectively deployed in a specific country, they must possess an understanding of the nation's culture and basic knowledge. To this end, we introduce National Alignment, which measures an alignment between an LLM and a targeted country from two aspects: social value alignment and common knowledge alignment. Social value alignment evaluates how well the model understands nation-specific social values, while common knowledge alignment examines how well the model captures basic knowledge related to the nation. We constructed KorNAT, the first benchmark that measures national alignment with South Korea. For the social value dataset, we obtained ground truth labels from a large-scale survey involving 6,174 unique Korean participants. For the common knowledge dataset, we constructed samples based on Korean textbooks and GED reference materials. KorNAT contains 4K and 6K multiple-choice questions for social value and common knowledge, respectively. Our dataset creation process is meticulously designed and based on statistical sampling theory and was refined through multiple rounds of human review. The experiment results of seven LLMs reveal that only a few models met our reference score, indicating a potential for further enhancement. KorNAT has received government approval after passing an assessment conducted by a government-affiliated organization dedicated to evaluating dataset quality. Samples and detailed evaluation protocols of our dataset can be found in https://selectstar.ai/ko/papers-national-alignment

Dense Text-to-Image Generation with Attention Modulation

Existing text-to-image diffusion models struggle to synthesize realistic images given dense captions, where each text prompt provides a detailed description for a specific image region. To address this, we propose DenseDiffusion, a training-free method that adapts a pre-trained text-to-image model to handle such dense captions while offering control over the scene layout. We first analyze the relationship between generated images' layouts and the pre-trained model's intermediate attention maps. Next, we develop an attention modulation method that guides objects to appear in specific regions according to layout guidance. Without requiring additional fine-tuning or datasets, we improve image generation performance given dense captions regarding both automatic and human evaluation scores. In addition, we achieve similar-quality visual results with models specifically trained with layout conditions.

Hierarchical Visual Primitive Experts for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen compositions with prior knowledge of known primitives (attribute and object). Previous works for CZSL often suffer from grasping the contextuality between attribute and object, as well as the discriminability of visual features, and the long-tailed distribution of real-world compositional data. We propose a simple and scalable framework called Composition Transformer (CoT) to address these issues. CoT employs object and attribute experts in distinctive manners to generate representative embeddings, using the visual network hierarchically. The object expert extracts representative object embeddings from the final layer in a bottom-up manner, while the attribute expert makes attribute embeddings in a top-down manner with a proposed object-guided attention module that models contextuality explicitly. To remedy biased prediction caused by imbalanced data distribution, we develop a simple minority attribute augmentation (MAA) that synthesizes virtual samples by mixing two images and oversampling minority attribute classes. Our method achieves SoTA performance on several benchmarks, including MIT-States, C-GQA, and VAW-CZSL. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of CoT in improving visual discrimination and addressing the model bias from the imbalanced data distribution. The code is available at https://github.com/HanjaeKim98/CoT.