Fine-Grained control over Music Generation with Activation Steering

We present a method for fine-grained control over music generation through inference-time interventions on an autoregressive generative music transformer called MusicGen. Our approach enables timbre transfer, style transfer, and genre fusion by steering the residual stream using weights of linear probes trained on it, or by steering the attention layer activations in a similar manner. We observe that modelling this as a regression task provides improved performance, hypothesizing that the mean-squared-error better preserve meaningful directional information in the activation space. Combined with the global conditioning offered by text prompts in MusicGen, our method provides both global and local control over music generation. Audio samples illustrating our method are available at our demo page.

3D Object Reconstruction with mmWave Radars

This paper presents RFconstruct, a framework that enables 3D shape reconstruction using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) mmWave radars for self-driving scenarios. RFconstruct overcomes radar limitations of low angular resolution, specularity, and sparsity in radar point clouds through a holistic system design that addresses hardware, data processing, and machine learning challenges. The first step is fusing data captured by two radar devices that image orthogonal planes, then performing odometry-aware temporal fusion to generate denser 3D point clouds. RFconstruct then reconstructs 3D shapes of objects using a customized encoder-decoder model that does not require prior knowledge of the object's bound box. The shape reconstruction performance of RFconstruct is compared against 3D models extracted from a depth camera equipped with a LiDAR. We show that RFconstruct can accurately generate 3D shapes of cars, bikes, and pedestrians.