Balanced Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Imbalanced Regression

Regression is fundamental in computer vision and is widely used in various tasks including age estimation, depth estimation, target localization, \etc However, real-world data often exhibits imbalanced distribution, making regression models perform poorly especially for target values with rare observations~(known as the imbalanced regression problem). In this paper, we reframe imbalanced regression as an imbalanced generalization problem. To tackle that, we look into the loss sharpness property for measuring the generalization ability of regression models in the observation space. Namely, given a certain perturbation on the model parameters, we check how model performance changes according to the loss values of different target observations. We propose a simple yet effective approach called Balanced Sharpness-Aware Minimization~(BSAM) to enforce the uniform generalization ability of regression models for the entire observation space. In particular, we start from the traditional sharpness-aware minimization and then introduce a novel targeted reweighting strategy to homogenize the generalization ability across the observation space, which guarantees a theoretical generalization bound. Extensive experiments on multiple vision regression tasks, including age and depth estimation, demonstrate that our BSAM method consistently outperforms existing approaches. The code is available \href{https://github.com/manmanjun/BSAM_for_Imbalanced_Regression}{here}.

Step-Audio 2 Technical Report

This paper presents Step-Audio 2, an end-to-end multi-modal large language model designed for industry-strength audio understanding and speech conversation. By integrating a latent audio encoder and reasoning-centric reinforcement learning (RL), Step-Audio 2 achieves promising performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and audio understanding. To facilitate genuine end-to-end speech conversation, Step-Audio 2 incorporates the generation of discrete audio tokens into language modeling, significantly enhancing its responsiveness to paralinguistic information such as speaking styles and emotions. To effectively leverage the rich textual and acoustic knowledge in real-world data, Step-Audio 2 integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and is able to call external tools such as web search to mitigate hallucination and audio search to switch timbres. Trained on millions of hours of speech and audio data, Step-Audio 2 delivers intelligence and expressiveness across diverse conversational scenarios. Evaluation results demonstrate that Step-Audio 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on various audio understanding and conversational benchmarks compared to other open-source and commercial solutions. Please visit https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio2 for more information.

Self-Paced Collaborative and Adversarial Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

This paper proposes a new unsupervised domain adaptation approach called Collaborative and Adversarial Network (CAN), which uses the domain-collaborative and domain-adversarial learning strategy for training the neural network. The domain-collaborative learning aims to learn domain-specific feature representation to preserve the discriminability for the target domain, while the domain adversarial learning aims to learn domain-invariant feature representation to reduce the domain distribution mismatch between the source and target domains. We show that these two learning strategies can be uniformly formulated as domain classifier learning with positive or negative weights on the losses. We then design a collaborative and adversarial training scheme, which automatically learns domain-specific representations from lower blocks in CNNs through collaborative learning and domain-invariant representations from higher blocks through adversarial learning. Moreover, to further enhance the discriminability in the target domain, we propose Self-Paced CAN (SPCAN), which progressively selects pseudo-labeled target samples for re-training the classifiers. We employ a self-paced learning strategy to select pseudo-labeled target samples in an easy-to-hard fashion. Comprehensive experiments on different benchmark datasets, Office-31, ImageCLEF-DA, and VISDA-2017 for the object recognition task, and UCF101-10 and HMDB51-10 for the video action recognition task, show our newly proposed approaches achieve the state-of-the-art performance, which clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approaches for unsupervised domain adaptation.

Step-Audio-AQAA: a Fully End-to-End Expressive Large Audio Language Model

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have significantly advanced intelligent human-computer interaction, yet their reliance on text-based outputs limits their ability to generate natural speech responses directly, hindering seamless audio interactions. To address this, we introduce Step-Audio-AQAA, a fully end-to-end LALM designed for Audio Query-Audio Answer (AQAA) tasks. The model integrates a dual-codebook audio tokenizer for linguistic and semantic feature extraction, a 130-billion-parameter backbone LLM and a neural vocoder for high-fidelity speech synthesis. Our post-training approach employs interleaved token-output of text and audio to enhance semantic coherence and combines Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with model merge to improve performance. Evaluations on the StepEval-Audio-360 benchmark demonstrate that Step-Audio-AQAA excels especially in speech control, outperforming the state-of-art LALMs in key areas. This work contributes a promising solution for end-to-end LALMs and highlights the critical role of token-based vocoder in enhancing overall performance for AQAA tasks.

Integrating Intermediate Layer Optimization and Projected Gradient Descent for Solving Inverse Problems with Diffusion Models

Inverse problems (IPs) involve reconstructing signals from noisy observations. Recently, diffusion models (DMs) have emerged as a powerful framework for solving IPs, achieving remarkable reconstruction performance. However, existing DM-based methods frequently encounter issues such as heavy computational demands and suboptimal convergence. In this work, building upon the idea of the recent work DMPlug, we propose two novel methods, DMILO and DMILO-PGD, to address these challenges. Our first method, DMILO, employs intermediate layer optimization (ILO) to alleviate the memory burden inherent in DMPlug. Additionally, by introducing sparse deviations, we expand the range of DMs, enabling the exploration of underlying signals that may lie outside the range of the diffusion model. We further propose DMILO-PGD, which integrates ILO with projected gradient descent (PGD), thereby reducing the risk of suboptimal convergence. We provide an intuitive theoretical analysis of our approaches under appropriate conditions and validate their superiority through extensive experiments on diverse image datasets, encompassing both linear and nonlinear IPs. Our results demonstrate significant performance gains over state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the effectiveness of DMILO and DMILO-PGD in addressing common challenges in DM-based IP solvers.

Learned Image Compression with Dictionary-based Entropy Model

Learned image compression methods have attracted great research interest and exhibited superior rate-distortion performance to the best classical image compression standards of the present. The entropy model plays a key role in learned image compression, which estimates the probability distribution of the latent representation for further entropy coding. Most existing methods employed hyper-prior and auto-regressive architectures to form their entropy models. However, they only aimed to explore the internal dependencies of latent representation while neglecting the importance of extracting prior from training data. In this work, we propose a novel entropy model named Dictionary-based Cross Attention Entropy model, which introduces a learnable dictionary to summarize the typical structures occurring in the training dataset to enhance the entropy model. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed model strikes a better balance between performance and latency, achieving state-of-the-art results on various benchmark datasets.

Step-Audio: Unified Understanding and Generation in Intelligent Speech Interaction

Real-time speech interaction, serving as a fundamental interface for human-machine collaboration, holds immense potential. However, current open-source models face limitations such as high costs in voice data collection, weakness in dynamic control, and limited intelligence. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Step-Audio, the first production-ready open-source solution. Key contributions include: 1) a 130B-parameter unified speech-text multi-modal model that achieves unified understanding and generation, with the Step-Audio-Chat version open-sourced; 2) a generative speech data engine that establishes an affordable voice cloning framework and produces the open-sourced lightweight Step-Audio-TTS-3B model through distillation; 3) an instruction-driven fine control system enabling dynamic adjustments across dialects, emotions, singing, and RAP; 4) an enhanced cognitive architecture augmented with tool calling and role-playing abilities to manage complex tasks effectively. Based on our new StepEval-Audio-360 evaluation benchmark, Step-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance in human evaluations, especially in terms of instruction following. On open-source benchmarks like LLaMA Question, shows 9.3% average performance improvement, demonstrating our commitment to advancing the development of open-source multi-modal language technologies. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio.

Achieving Hiding and Smart Anti-Jamming Communication: A Parallel DRL Approach against Moving Reactive Jammer

This paper addresses the challenge of anti-jamming in moving reactive jamming scenarios. The moving reactive jammer initiates high-power tracking jamming upon detecting any transmission activity, and when unable to detect a signal, resorts to indiscriminate jamming. This presents dual imperatives: maintaining hiding to avoid the jammer's detection and simultaneously evading indiscriminate jamming. Spread spectrum techniques effectively reduce transmitting power to elude detection but fall short in countering indiscriminate jamming. Conversely, changing communication frequencies can help evade indiscriminate jamming but makes the transmission vulnerable to tracking jamming without spread spectrum techniques to remain hidden. Current methodologies struggle with the complexity of simultaneously optimizing these two requirements due to the expansive joint action spaces and the dynamics of moving reactive jammers. To address these challenges, we propose a parallelized deep reinforcement learning (DRL) strategy. The approach includes a parallelized network architecture designed to decompose the action space. A parallel exploration-exploitation selection mechanism replaces the $\varepsilon $-greedy mechanism, accelerating convergence. Simulations demonstrate a nearly 90\% increase in normalized throughput.

The Devil is in the Spurious Correlation: Boosting Moment Retrieval via Temporal Dynamic Learning

Given a textual query along with a corresponding video, the objective of moment retrieval aims to localize the moments relevant to the query within the video. While commendable results have been demonstrated by existing transformer-based approaches, predicting the accurate temporal span of the target moment is currently still a major challenge. In this paper, we reveal that a crucial reason stems from the spurious correlation between the text queries and the moment context. Namely, the model may associate the textual query with the background frames rather than the target moment. To address this issue, we propose a temporal dynamic learning approach for moment retrieval, where two strategies are designed to mitigate the spurious correlation. First, we introduce a novel video synthesis approach to construct a dynamic context for the relevant moment. With separate yet similar videos mixed up, the synthesis approach empowers our model to attend to the target moment of the corresponding query under various dynamic contexts. Second, we enhance the representation by learning temporal dynamics. Besides the visual representation, text queries are aligned with temporal dynamic representations, which enables our model to establish a non-spurious correlation between the query-related moment and context. With the aforementioned proposed method, the spurious correlation issue in moment retrieval can be largely alleviated. Our method establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on two popular benchmarks of moment retrieval, \ie, QVHighlights and Charades-STA. In addition, the detailed ablation analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategies. Our code will be publicly available.

S-INF: Towards Realistic Indoor Scene Synthesis via Scene Implicit Neural Field

Learning-based methods have become increasingly popular in 3D indoor scene synthesis (ISS), showing superior performance over traditional optimization-based approaches. These learning-based methods typically model distributions on simple yet explicit scene representations using generative models. However, due to the oversimplified explicit representations that overlook detailed information and the lack of guidance from multimodal relationships within the scene, most learning-based methods struggle to generate indoor scenes with realistic object arrangements and styles. In this paper, we introduce a new method, Scene Implicit Neural Field (S-INF), for indoor scene synthesis, aiming to learn meaningful representations of multimodal relationships, to enhance the realism of indoor scene synthesis. S-INF assumes that the scene layout is often related to the object-detailed information. It disentangles the multimodal relationships into scene layout relationships and detailed object relationships, fusing them later through implicit neural fields (INFs). By learning specialized scene layout relationships and projecting them into S-INF, we achieve a realistic generation of scene layout. Additionally, S-INF captures dense and detailed object relationships through differentiable rendering, ensuring stylistic consistency across objects. Through extensive experiments on the benchmark 3D-FRONT dataset, we demonstrate that our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance under different types of ISS.