NaturalSpeech 3: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Factorized Codec and Diffusion Models

While recent large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) models have achieved significant progress, they still fall short in speech quality, similarity, and prosody. Considering speech intricately encompasses various attributes (e.g., content, prosody, timbre, and acoustic details) that pose significant challenges for generation, a natural idea is to factorize speech into individual subspaces representing different attributes and generate them individually. Motivated by it, we propose NaturalSpeech 3, a TTS system with novel factorized diffusion models to generate natural speech in a zero-shot way. Specifically, 1) we design a neural codec with factorized vector quantization (FVQ) to disentangle speech waveform into subspaces of content, prosody, timbre, and acoustic details; 2) we propose a factorized diffusion model to generate attributes in each subspace following its corresponding prompt. With this factorization design, NaturalSpeech 3 can effectively and efficiently model the intricate speech with disentangled subspaces in a divide-and-conquer way. Experiments show that NaturalSpeech 3 outperforms the state-of-the-art TTS systems on quality, similarity, prosody, and intelligibility. Furthermore, we achieve better performance by scaling to 1B parameters and 200K hours of training data.

SHIELD : An Evaluation Benchmark for Face Spoofing and Forgery Detection with Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable problem-solving capabilities in various vision fields (e.g., generic object recognition and grounding) based on strong visual semantic representation and language reasoning ability. However, whether MLLMs are sensitive to subtle visual spoof/forged clues and how they perform in the domain of face attack detection (e.g., face spoofing and forgery detection) is still unexplored. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark, namely SHIELD, to evaluate the ability of MLLMs on face spoofing and forgery detection. Specifically, we design true/false and multiple-choice questions to evaluate multimodal face data in these two face security tasks. For the face anti-spoofing task, we evaluate three different modalities (i.e., RGB, infrared, depth) under four types of presentation attacks (i.e., print attack, replay attack, rigid mask, paper mask). For the face forgery detection task, we evaluate GAN-based and diffusion-based data with both visual and acoustic modalities. Each question is subjected to both zero-shot and few-shot tests under standard and chain of thought (COT) settings. The results indicate that MLLMs hold substantial potential in the face security domain, offering advantages over traditional specific models in terms of interpretability, multimodal flexible reasoning, and joint face spoof and forgery detection. Additionally, we develop a novel Multi-Attribute Chain of Thought (MA-COT) paradigm for describing and judging various task-specific and task-irrelevant attributes of face images, which provides rich task-related knowledge for subtle spoof/forged clue mining. Extensive experiments in separate face anti-spoofing, separate face forgery detection, and joint detection tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MA-COT. The project is available at https$:$//github.com/laiyingxin2/SHIELD

A Risk-aware Planning Framework of UGVs in Off-Road Environment

Planning module is an essential component of intelligent vehicle study. In this paper, we address the risk-aware planning problem of UGVs through a global-local planning framework which seamlessly integrates risk assessment methods. In particular, a global planning algorithm named Coarse2fine A* is proposed, which incorporates a potential field approach to enhance the safety of the planning results while ensuring the efficiency of the algorithm. A deterministic sampling method for local planning is leveraged and modified to suit off-road environment. It also integrates a risk assessment model to emphasize the avoidance of local risks. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated through simulation experiments by comparing it with baseline algorithms, where the results of Coarse2fine A* are shown to be approximately 30% safer than those of the baseline algorithms. The practicality and effectiveness of the proposed planning framework are validated by deploying it on a real-world system consisting of a control center and a practical UGV platform.

StyleSpeech: Self-supervised Style Enhancing with VQ-VAE-based Pre-training for Expressive Audiobook Speech Synthesis

The expressive quality of synthesized speech for audiobooks is limited by generalized model architecture and unbalanced style distribution in the training data. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a self-supervised style enhancing method with VQ-VAE-based pre-training for expressive audiobook speech synthesis. Firstly, a text style encoder is pre-trained with a large amount of unlabeled text-only data. Secondly, a spectrogram style extractor based on VQ-VAE is pre-trained in a self-supervised manner, with plenty of audio data that covers complex style variations. Then a novel architecture with two encoder-decoder paths is specially designed to model the pronunciation and high-level style expressiveness respectively, with the guidance of the style extractor. Both objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively improve the naturalness and expressiveness of the synthesized speech in audiobook synthesis especially for the role and out-of-domain scenarios.

ChatRadio-Valuer: A Chat Large Language Model for Generalizable Radiology Report Generation Based on Multi-institution and Multi-system Data

Radiology report generation, as a key step in medical image analysis, is critical to the quantitative analysis of clinically informed decision-making levels. However, complex and diverse radiology reports with cross-source heterogeneity pose a huge generalizability challenge to the current methods under massive data volume, mainly because the style and normativity of radiology reports are obviously distinctive among institutions, body regions inspected and radiologists. Recently, the advent of large language models (LLM) offers great potential for recognizing signs of health conditions. To resolve the above problem, we collaborate with the Second Xiangya Hospital in China and propose ChatRadio-Valuer based on the LLM, a tailored model for automatic radiology report generation that learns generalizable representations and provides a basis pattern for model adaptation in sophisticated analysts' cases. Specifically, ChatRadio-Valuer is trained based on the radiology reports from a single institution by means of supervised fine-tuning, and then adapted to disease diagnosis tasks for human multi-system evaluation (i.e., chest, abdomen, muscle-skeleton, head, and maxillofacial $\&$ neck) from six different institutions in clinical-level events. The clinical dataset utilized in this study encompasses a remarkable total of \textbf{332,673} observations. From the comprehensive results on engineering indicators, clinical efficacy and deployment cost metrics, it can be shown that ChatRadio-Valuer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, especially ChatGPT (GPT-3.5-Turbo) and GPT-4 et al., in terms of the diseases diagnosis from radiology reports. ChatRadio-Valuer provides an effective avenue to boost model generalization performance and alleviate the annotation workload of experts to enable the promotion of clinical AI applications in radiology reports.

Orbital AI-based Autonomous Refuelling Solution

Cameras are rapidly becoming the choice for on-board sensors towards space rendezvous due to their small form factor and inexpensive power, mass, and volume costs. When it comes to docking, however, they typically serve a secondary role, whereas the main work is done by active sensors such as lidar. This paper documents the development of a proposed AI-based (artificial intelligence) navigation algorithm intending to mature the use of on-board visible wavelength cameras as a main sensor for docking and on-orbit servicing (OOS), reducing the dependency on lidar and greatly reducing costs. Specifically, the use of AI enables the expansion of the relative navigation solution towards multiple classes of scenarios, e.g., in terms of targets or illumination conditions, which would otherwise have to be crafted on a case-by-case manner using classical image processing methods. Multiple convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone architectures are benchmarked on synthetically generated data of docking manoeuvres with the International Space Station (ISS), achieving position and attitude estimates close to 1% range-normalised and 1 deg, respectively. The integration of the solution with a physical prototype of the refuelling mechanism is validated in laboratory using a robotic arm to simulate a berthing procedure.

MuLanTTS: The Microsoft Speech Synthesis System for Blizzard Challenge 2023

In this paper, we present MuLanTTS, the Microsoft end-to-end neural text-to-speech (TTS) system designed for the Blizzard Challenge 2023. About 50 hours of audiobook corpus for French TTS as hub task and another 2 hours of speaker adaptation as spoke task are released to build synthesized voices for different test purposes including sentences, paragraphs, homographs, lists, etc. Building upon DelightfulTTS, we adopt contextual and emotion encoders to adapt the audiobook data to enrich beyond sentences for long-form prosody and dialogue expressiveness. Regarding the recording quality, we also apply denoise algorithms and long audio processing for both corpora. For the hub task, only the 50-hour single speaker data is used for building the TTS system, while for the spoke task, a multi-speaker source model is used for target speaker fine tuning. MuLanTTS achieves mean scores of quality assessment 4.3 and 4.5 in the respective tasks, statistically comparable with natural speech while keeping good similarity according to similarity assessment. The excellent and similarity in this year's new and dense statistical evaluation show the effectiveness of our proposed system in both tasks.

Large-Scale Automatic Audiobook Creation

An audiobook can dramatically improve a work of literature's accessibility and improve reader engagement. However, audiobooks can take hundreds of hours of human effort to create, edit, and publish. In this work, we present a system that can automatically generate high-quality audiobooks from online e-books. In particular, we leverage recent advances in neural text-to-speech to create and release thousands of human-quality, open-license audiobooks from the Project Gutenberg e-book collection. Our method can identify the proper subset of e-book content to read for a wide collection of diversely structured books and can operate on hundreds of books in parallel. Our system allows users to customize an audiobook's speaking speed and style, emotional intonation, and can even match a desired voice using a small amount of sample audio. This work contributed over five thousand open-license audiobooks and an interactive demo that allows users to quickly create their own customized audiobooks. To listen to the audiobook collection visit \url{https://aka.ms/audiobook}.

PromptTTS 2: Describing and Generating Voices with Text Prompt

Speech conveys more information than just text, as the same word can be uttered in various voices to convey diverse information. Compared to traditional text-to-speech (TTS) methods relying on speech prompts (reference speech) for voice variability, using text prompts (descriptions) is more user-friendly since speech prompts can be hard to find or may not exist at all. TTS approaches based on the text prompt face two challenges: 1) the one-to-many problem, where not all details about voice variability can be described in the text prompt, and 2) the limited availability of text prompt datasets, where vendors and large cost of data labeling are required to write text prompt for speech. In this work, we introduce PromptTTS 2 to address these challenges with a variation network to provide variability information of voice not captured by text prompts, and a prompt generation pipeline to utilize the large language models (LLM) to compose high quality text prompts. Specifically, the variation network predicts the representation extracted from the reference speech (which contains full information about voice) based on the text prompt representation. For the prompt generation pipeline, it generates text prompts for speech with a speech understanding model to recognize voice attributes (e.g., gender, speed) from speech and a large language model to formulate text prompt based on the recognition results. Experiments on a large-scale (44K hours) speech dataset demonstrate that compared to the previous works, PromptTTS 2 generates voices more consistent with text prompts and supports the sampling of diverse voice variability, thereby offering users more choices on voice generation. Additionally, the prompt generation pipeline produces high-quality prompts, eliminating the large labeling cost. The demo page of PromptTTS 2 is available online\footnote{https://speechresearch.github.io/prompttts2}.

FS-Depth: Focal-and-Scale Depth Estimation from a Single Image in Unseen Indoor Scene

It has long been an ill-posed problem to predict absolute depth maps from single images in real (unseen) indoor scenes. We observe that it is essentially due to not only the scale-ambiguous problem but also the focal-ambiguous problem that decreases the generalization ability of monocular depth estimation. That is, images may be captured by cameras of different focal lengths in scenes of different scales. In this paper, we develop a focal-and-scale depth estimation model to well learn absolute depth maps from single images in unseen indoor scenes. First, a relative depth estimation network is adopted to learn relative depths from single images with diverse scales/semantics. Second, multi-scale features are generated by mapping a single focal length value to focal length features and concatenating them with intermediate features of different scales in relative depth estimation. Finally, relative depths and multi-scale features are jointly fed into an absolute depth estimation network. In addition, a new pipeline is developed to augment the diversity of focal lengths of public datasets, which are often captured with cameras of the same or similar focal lengths. Our model is trained on augmented NYUDv2 and tested on three unseen datasets. Our model considerably improves the generalization ability of depth estimation by 41%/13% (RMSE) with/without data augmentation compared with five recent SOTAs and well alleviates the deformation problem in 3D reconstruction. Notably, our model well maintains the accuracy of depth estimation on original NYUDv2.