Towards Diverse and Efficient Audio Captioning via Diffusion Models

We introduce Diffusion-based Audio Captioning (DAC), a non-autoregressive diffusion model tailored for diverse and efficient audio captioning. Although existing captioning models relying on language backbones have achieved remarkable success in various captioning tasks, their insufficient performance in terms of generation speed and diversity impede progress in audio understanding and multimedia applications. Our diffusion-based framework offers unique advantages stemming from its inherent stochasticity and holistic context modeling in captioning. Through rigorous evaluation, we demonstrate that DAC not only achieves SOTA performance levels compared to existing benchmarks in the caption quality, but also significantly outperforms them in terms of generation speed and diversity. The success of DAC illustrates that text generation can also be seamlessly integrated with audio and visual generation tasks using a diffusion backbone, paving the way for a unified, audio-related generative model across different modalities.

A Noval Feature via Color Quantisation for Fake Audio Detection

In the field of deepfake detection, previous studies focus on using reconstruction or mask and prediction methods to train pre-trained models, which are then transferred to fake audio detection training where the encoder is used to extract features, such as wav2vec2.0 and Masked Auto Encoder. These methods have proven that using real audio for reconstruction pre-training can better help the model distinguish fake audio. However, the disadvantage lies in poor interpretability, meaning it is hard to intuitively present the differences between deepfake and real audio. This paper proposes a noval feature extraction method via color quantisation which constrains the reconstruction to use a limited number of colors for the spectral image-like input. The proposed method ensures reconstructed input differs from the original, which allows for intuitive observation of the focus areas in the spectral reconstruction. Experiments conducted on the ASVspoof2019 dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better classification performance compared to using the original spectral as input and pretraining the recolor network can also benefit the fake audio detection.

EELE: Exploring Efficient and Extensible LoRA Integration in Emotional Text-to-Speech

In the current era of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) method has emerged. It uses a plugin-based approach to learn new knowledge with lower parameter quantities and computational costs, and it can be plugged in and out based on the specific sub-tasks, offering high flexibility. However, the current application schemes primarily incorporate LoRA into the pre-introduced conditional parts of the speech models. This fixes the position of LoRA, limiting the flexibility and scalability of its application. Therefore, we propose the Exploring Efficient and Extensible LoRA Integration in Emotional Text-to-Speech (EELE) method. Starting from a general neutral speech model, we do not pre-introduce emotional information but instead use the LoRA plugin to design a flexible adaptive scheme that endows the model with emotional generation capabilities. Specifically, we initially train the model using only neutral speech data. After training is complete, we insert LoRA into different modules and fine-tune the model with emotional speech data to find the optimal insertion scheme. Through experiments, we compare and test the effects of inserting LoRA at different positions within the model and assess LoRA's ability to learn various emotions, effectively proving the validity of our method. Additionally, we explore the impact of the rank size of LoRA and the difference compared to directly fine-tuning the entire model.

Does Current Deepfake Audio Detection Model Effectively Detect ALM-based Deepfake Audio?

Currently, Audio Language Models (ALMs) are rapidly advancing due to the developments in large language models and audio neural codecs. These ALMs have significantly lowered the barrier to creating deepfake audio, generating highly realistic and diverse types of deepfake audio, which pose severe threats to society. Consequently, effective audio deepfake detection technologies to detect ALM-based audio have become increasingly critical. This paper investigate the effectiveness of current countermeasure (CM) against ALM-based audio. Specifically, we collect 12 types of the latest ALM-based deepfake audio and utilizing the latest CMs to evaluate. Our findings reveal that the latest codec-trained CM can effectively detect ALM-based audio, achieving 0% equal error rate under most ALM test conditions, which exceeded our expectations. This indicates promising directions for future research in ALM-based deepfake audio detection.

Temporal Variability and Multi-Viewed Self-Supervised Representations to Tackle the ASVspoof5 Deepfake Challenge

ASVspoof5, the fifth edition of the ASVspoof series, is one of the largest global audio security challenges. It aims to advance the development of countermeasure (CM) to discriminate bonafide and spoofed speech utterances. In this paper, we focus on addressing the problem of open-domain audio deepfake detection, which corresponds directly to the ASVspoof5 Track1 open condition. At first, we comprehensively investigate various CM on ASVspoof5, including data expansion, data augmentation, and self-supervised learning (SSL) features. Due to the high-frequency gaps characteristic of the ASVspoof5 dataset, we introduce Frequency Mask, a data augmentation method that masks specific frequency bands to improve CM robustness. Combining various scale of temporal information with multiple SSL features, our experiments achieved a minDCF of 0.0158 and an EER of 0.55% on the ASVspoof 5 Track 1 evaluation progress set.

VQ-CTAP: Cross-Modal Fine-Grained Sequence Representation Learning for Speech Processing

Deep learning has brought significant improvements to the field of cross-modal representation learning. For tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS), voice conversion (VC), and automatic speech recognition (ASR), a cross-modal fine-grained (frame-level) sequence representation is desired, emphasizing the semantic content of the text modality while de-emphasizing the paralinguistic information of the speech modality. We propose a method called "Vector Quantized Contrastive Token-Acoustic Pre-training (VQ-CTAP)", which uses the cross-modal aligned sequence transcoder to bring text and speech into a joint multimodal space, learning how to connect text and speech at the frame level. The proposed VQ-CTAP is a paradigm for cross-modal sequence representation learning, offering a promising solution for fine-grained generation and recognition tasks in speech processing. The VQ-CTAP can be directly applied to VC and ASR tasks without fine-tuning or additional structures. We propose a sequence-aware semantic connector, which connects multiple frozen pre-trained modules for the TTS task, exhibiting a plug-and-play capability. We design a stepping optimization strategy to ensure effective model convergence by gradually injecting and adjusting the influence of various loss components. Furthermore, we propose a semantic-transfer-wise paralinguistic consistency loss to enhance representational capabilities, allowing the model to better generalize to unseen data and capture the nuances of paralinguistic information. In addition, VQ-CTAP achieves high-compression speech coding at a rate of 25Hz from 24kHz input waveforms, which is a 960-fold reduction in the sampling rate. The audio demo is available at https://qiangchunyu.github.io/VQCTAP/

MDPE: A Multimodal Deception Dataset with Personality and Emotional Characteristics

Deception detection has garnered increasing attention in recent years due to the significant growth of digital media and heightened ethical and security concerns. It has been extensively studied using multimodal methods, including video, audio, and text. In addition, individual differences in deception production and detection are believed to play a crucial role.Although some studies have utilized individual information such as personality traits to enhance the performance of deception detection, current systems remain limited, partly due to a lack of sufficient datasets for evaluating performance. To address this issue, we introduce a multimodal deception dataset MDPE. Besides deception features, this dataset also includes individual differences information in personality and emotional expression characteristics. It can explore the impact of individual differences on deception behavior. It comprises over 104 hours of deception and emotional videos from 193 subjects. Furthermore, we conducted numerous experiments to provide valuable insights for future deception detection research. MDPE not only supports deception detection, but also provides conditions for tasks such as personality recognition and emotion recognition, and can even study the relationships between them. We believe that MDPE will become a valuable resource for promoting research in the field of affective computing.

ASRRL-TTS: Agile Speaker Representation Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-Speech Speaker Adaptation

Speaker adaptation, which involves cloning voices from unseen speakers in the Text-to-Speech task, has garnered significant interest due to its numerous applications in multi-media fields. Despite recent advancements, existing methods often struggle with inadequate speaker representation accuracy and overfitting, particularly in limited reference speeches scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose an Agile Speaker Representation Reinforcement Learning strategy to enhance speaker similarity in speaker adaptation tasks. ASRRL is the first work to apply reinforcement learning to improve the modeling accuracy of speaker embeddings in speaker adaptation, addressing the challenge of decoupling voice content and timbre. Our approach introduces two action strategies tailored to different reference speeches scenarios. In the single-sentence scenario, a knowledge-oriented optimal routine searching RL method is employed to expedite the exploration and retrieval of refinement information on the fringe of speaker representations. In the few-sentence scenario, we utilize a dynamic RL method to adaptively fuse reference speeches, enhancing the robustness and accuracy of speaker modeling. To achieve optimal results in the target domain, a multi-scale fusion scoring mechanism based reward model that evaluates speaker similarity, speech quality, and intelligibility across three dimensions is proposed, ensuring that improvements in speaker similarity do not compromise speech quality or intelligibility. The experimental results on the LibriTTS and VCTK datasets within mainstream TTS frameworks demonstrate the extensibility and generalization capabilities of the proposed ASRRL method. The results indicate that the ASRRL method significantly outperforms traditional fine-tuning approaches, achieving higher speaker similarity and better overall speech quality with limited reference speeches.

Fake News Detection and Manipulation Reasoning via Large Vision-Language Models

Fake news becomes a growing threat to information security and public opinion with the rapid sprawl of media manipulation. Therefore, fake news detection attracts widespread attention from academic community. Traditional fake news detection models demonstrate remarkable performance on authenticity binary classification but their ability to reason detailed faked traces based on the news content remains under-explored. Furthermore, due to the lack of external knowledge, the performance of existing methods on fact-related news is questionable, leaving their practical implementation unclear. In this paper, we propose a new multi-media research topic, namely manipulation reasoning. Manipulation reasoning aims to reason manipulations based on news content. To support the research, we introduce a benchmark for fake news detection and manipulation reasoning, referred to as Human-centric and Fact-related Fake News (HFFN). The benchmark highlights the centrality of human and the high factual relevance, with detailed manual annotations. HFFN encompasses four realistic domains with fake news samples generated through three manipulation approaches. Moreover, a Multi-modal news Detection and Reasoning langUage Model (M-DRUM) is presented not only to judge on the authenticity of multi-modal news, but also raise analytical reasoning about potential manipulations. On the feature extraction level, a cross-attention mechanism is employed to extract fine-grained fusion features from multi-modal inputs. On the reasoning level, a large vision-language model (LVLM) serves as the backbone to facilitate fact-related reasoning. A two-stage training framework is deployed to better activate the capacity of identification and reasoning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) fake news detection models and powerful LVLMs like GPT-4 and LLaVA.

A multi-speaker multi-lingual voice cloning system based on vits2 for limmits 2024 challenge

This paper presents the development of a speech synthesis system for the LIMMITS'24 Challenge, focusing primarily on Track 2. The objective of the challenge is to establish a multi-speaker, multi-lingual Indic Text-to-Speech system with voice cloning capabilities, covering seven Indian languages with both male and female speakers. The system was trained using challenge data and fine-tuned for few-shot voice cloning on target speakers. Evaluation included both mono-lingual and cross-lingual synthesis across all seven languages, with subjective tests assessing naturalness and speaker similarity. Our system uses the VITS2 architecture, augmented with a multi-lingual ID and a BERT model to enhance contextual language comprehension. In Track 1, where no additional data usage was permitted, our model achieved a Speaker Similarity score of 4.02. In Track 2, which allowed the use of extra data, it attained a Speaker Similarity score of 4.17.