Northeast Normal University
Abstract:One-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to alter the timbre of speech from a source speaker to match that of a target speaker using just a single reference speech from the target, while preserving the semantic content of the original source speech. Despite advancements in one-shot VC, its effectiveness decreases in real-world scenarios where reference speeches, often sourced from the internet, contain various disturbances like background noise. To address this issue, we introduce Noro, a Noise Robust One-shot VC system. Noro features innovative components tailored for VC using noisy reference speeches, including a dual-branch reference encoding module and a noise-agnostic contrastive speaker loss. Experimental results demonstrate that Noro outperforms our baseline system in both clean and noisy scenarios, highlighting its efficacy for real-world applications. Additionally, we investigate the hidden speaker representation capabilities of our baseline system by repurposing its reference encoder as a speaker encoder. The results shows that it is competitive with several advanced self-supervised learning models for speaker representation under the SUPERB settings, highlighting the potential for advancing speaker representation learning through one-shot VC task.
Abstract:Modern autonomous vehicle perception systems often struggle with occlusions and limited perception range. Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of cooperative perception in extending the perception range and overcoming occlusions, thereby improving the safety of autonomous driving. In recent years, a series of cooperative perception datasets have emerged. However, these datasets only focus on camera and LiDAR, overlooking 4D Radar, a sensor employed in single-vehicle autonomous driving for robust perception in adverse weather conditions. In this paper, to bridge the gap of missing 4D Radar datasets in cooperative perception, we present V2X-Radar, the first large real-world multi-modal dataset featuring 4D Radar. Our V2X-Radar dataset is collected using a connected vehicle platform and an intelligent roadside unit equipped with 4D Radar, LiDAR, and multi-view cameras. The collected data includes sunny and rainy weather conditions, spanning daytime, dusk, and nighttime, as well as typical challenging scenarios. The dataset comprises 20K LiDAR frames, 40K camera images, and 20K 4D Radar data, with 350K annotated bounding boxes across five categories. To facilitate diverse research domains, we establish V2X-Radar-C for cooperative perception, V2X-Radar-I for roadside perception, and V2X-Radar-V for single-vehicle perception. We further provide comprehensive benchmarks of recent perception algorithms on the above three sub-datasets. The dataset and benchmark codebase will be available at \url{http://openmpd.com/column/V2X-Radar}.
Abstract:This paper developed an efficient method for calibrating triaxial MEMS gyroscopes, which can be effectively utilized in the field environment. The core strategy is to utilize the criterion that the dot product of the measured gravity and the rotation speed in a fixed frame remains constant. To eliminate the impact of external acceleration, the calibration process involves separate procedures for measuring local gravity and rotation speed. Moreover, unlike existing approaches for auto calibration of triaxial sensors that often result in nonlinear optimization problems, the proposed method simplifies the estimation of the gyroscope scale factor by employing a linear least squares algorithm. Extensive numerical simulations have been conducted to analyze the proposed method's performance in calibrating the six-parameter triaxial gyroscope model, taking into consideration measurements corrupted by simulated noise. Experimental validation was also carried out using two commercially available MEMS inertial measurement units (LSM9DS1) and a servo motor. The experimental results effectively demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed calibration approach.
Abstract:Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing is widely applied in fields such as emergency response, owing to its advantages of rapid information acquisition and low cost. However, due to the effects of shooting distance and imaging mechanisms, the objects in the images present challenges such as small size, dense distribution, and low inter-class differentiation. To this end, we propose a multimodal remote sensing detection network that employs a quad-directional selective scanning fusion strategy called RemoteDet-Mamba. RemoteDet-Mamba simultaneously facilitates the learning of single-modal local features and the integration of patch-level global features across modalities, enhancing the distinguishability for small objects and utilizing local information to improve discrimination between different classes. Additionally, the use of Mamba's serial processing significantly increases detection speed. Experimental results on the DroneVehicle dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of RemoteDet-Mamba, which achieves superior detection accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining computational efficiency and parameter count.
Abstract:Large-scale speech generation models have achieved impressive performance in the zero-shot voice clone tasks relying on large-scale datasets. However, exploring how to achieve zero-shot voice clone with small-scale datasets is also essential. This paper proposes SF-Speech, a novel state-of-the-art voice clone model based on ordinary differential equations and contextual learning. Unlike the previous works, SF-Speech employs a multi-stage generation strategy to obtain the coarse acoustic feature and utilizes this feature to straighten the curved reverse trajectories caused by training the ordinary differential equation model with flow matching. In addition, we find the difference between the local correlations of different types of acoustic features and demonstrate the potential role of 2D convolution in modeling mel-spectrogram features. After training with less than 1000 hours of speech, SF-Speech significantly outperforms those methods based on global speaker embedding or autoregressive large language models. In particular, SF-Speech also shows a significant advantage over VoiceBox, the best-performing ordinary differential equation model, in speech intelligibility (a relative decrease of 22.4\% on word error rate) and timbre similarity (a relative improvement of 5.6\% on cosine distance) at a similar scale of parameters, and even keep a slight advantage when the parameters of VoiceBox are tripled.
Abstract:Hallucination is a key roadblock for applications of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly for enterprise applications that are sensitive to information accuracy. To address this issue, two general approaches have been explored: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to supply LLMs with updated information as context, and fine-tuning the LLMs with new information and desired output styles. In this paper, we propose Honest AI: a novel strategy to fine-tune "small" language models to say "I don't know" to reduce hallucination, along with several alternative RAG approaches. The solution ranked 1st in Task 2 for the false premise question. The alternative approaches include using RAG with search engine and knowledge graph results, fine-tuning base LLMs with new information and combinations of both approaches. Although all approaches improve the performance of the LLMs, RAG alone does not significantly improve the performance and fine-tuning is needed for better results. Finally, the hybrid approach achieved the highest score in the CRAG benchmark. In addition, our approach emphasizes the use of relatively small models with fewer than 10 billion parameters, promoting resource efficiency.
Abstract:Counterfeit products such as drugs and vaccines as well as luxury items such as high-fashion handbags, watches, jewelry, garments, and cosmetics, represent significant direct losses of revenue to legitimate manufacturers and vendors, as well as indirect costs to societies at large. We present the world's first purely computer-vision-based system to combat such counterfeiting-one that does not require special security tags or other alterations to the products or modifications to supply chain tracking. Our deep neural network system shows high accuracy on branded garments from our first manufacturer tested (99.71% after 3.06% rejections) using images captured under natural, weakly controlled conditions, such as in retail stores, customs checkpoints, warehouses, and outdoors. Our system, suitably transfer trained on a small number of fake and genuine articles, should find application in additional product categories as well, for example fashion accessories, perfume boxes, medicines, and more.
Abstract:Diffusion-based image super-resolution (SR) models have attracted substantial interest due to their powerful image restoration capabilities. However, prevailing diffusion models often struggle to strike an optimal balance between efficiency and performance. Typically, they either neglect to exploit the potential of existing extensive pretrained models, limiting their generative capacity, or they necessitate a dozens of forward passes starting from random noises, compromising inference efficiency. In this paper, we present DoSSR, a Domain Shift diffusion-based SR model that capitalizes on the generative powers of pretrained diffusion models while significantly enhancing efficiency by initiating the diffusion process with low-resolution (LR) images. At the core of our approach is a domain shift equation that integrates seamlessly with existing diffusion models. This integration not only improves the use of diffusion prior but also boosts inference efficiency. Moreover, we advance our method by transitioning the discrete shift process to a continuous formulation, termed as DoS-SDEs. This advancement leads to the fast and customized solvers that further enhance sampling efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on synthetic and real-world datasets, while notably requiring only 5 sampling steps. Compared to previous diffusion prior based methods, our approach achieves a remarkable speedup of 5-7 times, demonstrating its superior efficiency. Code: https://github.com/QinpengCui/DoSSR.
Abstract:In recent years, speech generation technology has advanced rapidly, fueled by generative models and large-scale training techniques. While these developments have enabled the production of high-quality synthetic speech, they have also raised concerns about the misuse of this technology, particularly for generating synthetic misinformation. Current research primarily focuses on distinguishing machine-generated speech from human-produced speech, but the more urgent challenge is detecting misinformation within spoken content. This task requires a thorough analysis of factors such as speaker identity, topic, and synthesis. To address this need, we conduct an initial investigation into synthetic spoken misinformation detection by introducing an open-source dataset, SpMis. SpMis includes speech synthesized from over 1,000 speakers across five common topics, utilizing state-of-the-art text-to-speech systems. Although our results show promising detection capabilities, they also reveal substantial challenges for practical implementation, underscoring the importance of ongoing research in this critical area.
Abstract:Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) have emerged as powerful probabilistic models for generative tasks. However, their convergence properties have not been rigorously proven. The challenge of proving convergence is inherently difficult due to the highly non-convex nature of the training objective and the implementation of a Stochastic Neural Network (SNN) within VAE architectures. This paper addresses these challenges by characterizing the optimization trajectory of SNNs utilized in VAEs through the lens of Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) techniques. These techniques govern the optimization and generalization behaviors of ultra-wide neural networks. We provide a mathematical proof of VAE convergence under mild assumptions, thus advancing the theoretical understanding of VAE optimization dynamics. Furthermore, we establish a novel connection between the optimization problem faced by over-parameterized SNNs and the Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR) problem. Our findings not only contribute to the theoretical foundation of VAEs but also open new avenues for investigating the optimization of generative models using advanced kernel methods. Our theoretical claims are verified by experimental simulations.