Prompt-Singer: Controllable Singing-Voice-Synthesis with Natural Language Prompt

Recent singing-voice-synthesis (SVS) methods have achieved remarkable audio quality and naturalness, yet they lack the capability to control the style attributes of the synthesized singing explicitly. We propose Prompt-Singer, the first SVS method that enables attribute controlling on singer gender, vocal range and volume with natural language. We adopt a model architecture based on a decoder-only transformer with a multi-scale hierarchy, and design a range-melody decoupled pitch representation that enables text-conditioned vocal range control while keeping melodic accuracy. Furthermore, we explore various experiment settings, including different types of text representations, text encoder fine-tuning, and introducing speech data to alleviate data scarcity, aiming to facilitate further research. Experiments show that our model achieves favorable controlling ability and audio quality. Audio samples are available at http://prompt-singer.github.io .

DART: Implicit Doppler Tomography for Radar Novel View Synthesis

Simulation is an invaluable tool for radio-frequency system designers that enables rapid prototyping of various algorithms for imaging, target detection, classification, and tracking. However, simulating realistic radar scans is a challenging task that requires an accurate model of the scene, radio frequency material properties, and a corresponding radar synthesis function. Rather than specifying these models explicitly, we propose DART - Doppler Aided Radar Tomography, a Neural Radiance Field-inspired method which uses radar-specific physics to create a reflectance and transmittance-based rendering pipeline for range-Doppler images. We then evaluate DART by constructing a custom data collection platform and collecting a novel radar dataset together with accurate position and instantaneous velocity measurements from lidar-based localization. In comparison to state-of-the-art baselines, DART synthesizes superior radar range-Doppler images from novel views across all datasets and additionally can be used to generate high quality tomographic images.

TransFace: Unit-Based Audio-Visual Speech Synthesizer for Talking Head Translation

Direct speech-to-speech translation achieves high-quality results through the introduction of discrete units obtained from self-supervised learning. This approach circumvents delays and cascading errors associated with model cascading. However, talking head translation, converting audio-visual speech (i.e., talking head video) from one language into another, still confronts several challenges compared to audio speech: (1) Existing methods invariably rely on cascading, synthesizing via both audio and text, resulting in delays and cascading errors. (2) Talking head translation has a limited set of reference frames. If the generated translation exceeds the length of the original speech, the video sequence needs to be supplemented by repeating frames, leading to jarring video transitions. In this work, we propose a model for talking head translation, \textbf{TransFace}, which can directly translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. It consists of a speech-to-unit translation model to convert audio speech into discrete units and a unit-based audio-visual speech synthesizer, Unit2Lip, to re-synthesize synchronized audio-visual speech from discrete units in parallel. Furthermore, we introduce a Bounded Duration Predictor, ensuring isometric talking head translation and preventing duplicate reference frames. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed Unit2Lip model significantly improves synchronization (1.601 and 0.982 on LSE-C for the original and generated audio speech, respectively) and boosts inference speed by a factor of 4.35 on LRS2. Additionally, TransFace achieves impressive BLEU scores of 61.93 and 47.55 for Es-En and Fr-En on LRS3-T and 100% isochronous translations.

Chat-3D v2: Bridging 3D Scene and Large Language Models with Object Identifiers

Recent research has evidenced the significant potentials of Large Language Models (LLMs) in handling challenging tasks within 3D scenes. However, current models are constrained to addressing object-centric tasks, where each question-answer pair focuses solely on an individual object. In real-world applications, users may pose queries involving multiple objects or expect for answers that precisely reference various objects. We introduce the use of object identifiers to freely reference objects during a conversation. While this solution appears straightforward, it presents two main challenges: 1) How to establish a reliable one-to-one correspondence between each object and its identifier? 2) How to incorporate complex spatial relationships among dozens of objects into the embedding space of the LLM? To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage alignment method, which involves learning an attribute-aware token and a relation-aware token for each object. These tokens capture the object's attributes and spatial relationships with surrounding objects in the 3D scene. Once the alignment is established, we can fine-tune our model on various downstream tasks using instruction tuning. Experiments conducted on traditional datasets like ScanQA, ScanRefer, and Nr3D/Sr3D showcase the effectiveness of our proposed method. Additionally, we create a 3D scene captioning dataset annotated with rich object identifiers, with the assistant of GPT-4. This dataset aims to further explore the capability of object identifiers in effective object referencing and precise scene understanding.

Extending Multi-modal Contrastive Representations

Multi-modal contrastive representation (MCR) of more than three modalities is critical in multi-modal learning. Although recent methods showcase impressive achievements, the high dependence on large-scale, high-quality paired data and the expensive training costs limit their further development. Inspired by recent C-MCR, this paper proposes Extending Multimodal Contrastive Representation (Ex-MCR), a training-efficient and paired-data-free method to flexibly learn unified contrastive representation space for more than three modalities by integrating the knowledge of existing MCR spaces. Specifically, Ex-MCR aligns multiple existing MCRs into the same based MCR, which can effectively preserve the original semantic alignment of the based MCR. Besides, we comprehensively enhance the entire learning pipeline for aligning MCR spaces from the perspectives of training data, architecture, and learning objectives. With the preserved original modality alignment and the enhanced space alignment, Ex-MCR shows superior representation learning performance and excellent modality extensibility. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Ex-MCR, we align the MCR spaces of CLAP (audio-text) and ULIP (3D-vision) into the CLIP (vision-text), leveraging the overlapping text and image modality, respectively. Remarkably, without using any paired data, Ex-MCR learns a 3D-image-text-audio unified contrastive representation, and it achieves state-of-the-art performance on audio-visual, 3D-image, audio-text, visual-text retrieval, and 3D object classification tasks. More importantly, extensive qualitative results further demonstrate the emergent semantic alignment between the extended modalities (e.g., audio and 3D), which highlights the great potential of modality extensibility.

Variance-Aware Regret Bounds for Stochastic Contextual Dueling Bandits

Dueling bandits is a prominent framework for decision-making involving preferential feedback, a valuable feature that fits various applications involving human interaction, such as ranking, information retrieval, and recommendation systems. While substantial efforts have been made to minimize the cumulative regret in dueling bandits, a notable gap in the current research is the absence of regret bounds that account for the inherent uncertainty in pairwise comparisons between the dueling arms. Intuitively, greater uncertainty suggests a higher level of difficulty in the problem. To bridge this gap, this paper studies the problem of contextual dueling bandits, where the binary comparison of dueling arms is generated from a generalized linear model (GLM). We propose a new SupLinUCB-type algorithm that enjoys computational efficiency and a variance-aware regret bound $\tilde O\big(d\sqrt{\sum_{t=1}^T\sigma_t^2} + d\big)$, where $\sigma_t$ is the variance of the pairwise comparison in round $t$, $d$ is the dimension of the context vectors, and $T$ is the time horizon. Our regret bound naturally aligns with the intuitive expectation in scenarios where the comparison is deterministic, the algorithm only suffers from an $\tilde O(d)$ regret. We perform empirical experiments on synthetic data to confirm the advantage of our method over previous variance-agnostic algorithms.

A Remote Sim2real Aerial Competition: Fostering Reproducibility and Solutions' Diversity in Robotics Challenges

Shared benchmark problems have historically been a fundamental driver of progress for scientific communities. In the context of academic conferences, competitions offer the opportunity to researchers with different origins, backgrounds, and levels of seniority to quantitatively compare their ideas. In robotics, a hot and challenging topic is sim2real-porting approaches that work well in simulation to real robot hardware. In our case, creating a hybrid competition with both simulation and real robot components was also dictated by the uncertainties around travel and logistics in the post-COVID-19 world. Hence, this article motivates and describes an aerial sim2real robot competition that ran during the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, from the specification of the competition task, to the details of the software infrastructure supporting simulation and real-life experiments, to the approaches of the top-placed teams and the lessons learned by participants and organizers.

Gloss Attention for Gloss-free Sign Language Translation

Most sign language translation (SLT) methods to date require the use of gloss annotations to provide additional supervision information, however, the acquisition of gloss is not easy. To solve this problem, we first perform an analysis of existing models to confirm how gloss annotations make SLT easier. We find that it can provide two aspects of information for the model, 1) it can help the model implicitly learn the location of semantic boundaries in continuous sign language videos, 2) it can help the model understand the sign language video globally. We then propose \emph{gloss attention}, which enables the model to keep its attention within video segments that have the same semantics locally, just as gloss helps existing models do. Furthermore, we transfer the knowledge of sentence-to-sentence similarity from the natural language model to our gloss attention SLT network (GASLT) to help it understand sign language videos at the sentence level. Experimental results on multiple large-scale sign language datasets show that our proposed GASLT model significantly outperforms existing methods. Our code is provided in \url{https://github.com/YinAoXiong/GASLT}.

OpenSR: Open-Modality Speech Recognition via Maintaining Multi-Modality Alignment

Speech Recognition builds a bridge between the multimedia streaming (audio-only, visual-only or audio-visual) and the corresponding text transcription. However, when training the specific model of new domain, it often gets stuck in the lack of new-domain utterances, especially the labeled visual utterances. To break through this restriction, we attempt to achieve zero-shot modality transfer by maintaining the multi-modality alignment in phoneme space learned with unlabeled multimedia utterances in the high resource domain during the pre-training \cite{shi2022learning}, and propose a training system Open-modality Speech Recognition (\textbf{OpenSR}) that enables the models trained on a single modality (e.g., audio-only) applicable to more modalities (e.g., visual-only and audio-visual). Furthermore, we employ a cluster-based prompt tuning strategy to handle the domain shift for the scenarios with only common words in the new domain utterances. We demonstrate that OpenSR enables modality transfer from one to any in three different settings (zero-, few- and full-shot), and achieves highly competitive zero-shot performance compared to the existing few-shot and full-shot lip-reading methods. To the best of our knowledge, OpenSR achieves the state-of-the-art performance of word error rate in LRS2 on audio-visual speech recognition and lip-reading with 2.7\% and 25.0\%, respectively. The code and demo are available at https://github.com/Exgc/OpenSR.

DATE: Domain Adaptive Product Seeker for E-commerce

Product Retrieval (PR) and Grounding (PG), aiming to seek image and object-level products respectively according to a textual query, have attracted great interest recently for better shopping experience. Owing to the lack of relevant datasets, we collect two large-scale benchmark datasets from Taobao Mall and Live domains with about 474k and 101k image-query pairs for PR, and manually annotate the object bounding boxes in each image for PG. As annotating boxes is expensive and time-consuming, we attempt to transfer knowledge from annotated domain to unannotated for PG to achieve un-supervised Domain Adaptation (PG-DA). We propose a {\bf D}omain {\bf A}daptive Produc{\bf t} S{\bf e}eker ({\bf DATE}) framework, regarding PR and PG as Product Seeking problem at different levels, to assist the query {\bf date} the product. Concretely, we first design a semantics-aggregated feature extractor for each modality to obtain concentrated and comprehensive features for following efficient retrieval and fine-grained grounding tasks. Then, we present two cooperative seekers to simultaneously search the image for PR and localize the product for PG. Besides, we devise a domain aligner for PG-DA to alleviate uni-modal marginal and multi-modal conditional distribution shift between source and target domains, and design a pseudo box generator to dynamically select reliable instances and generate bounding boxes for further knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments show that our DATE achieves satisfactory performance in fully-supervised PR, PG and un-supervised PG-DA. Our desensitized datasets will be publicly available here\footnote{\url{https://github.com/Taobao-live/Product-Seeking}}.