Multivariate Diffusion Transformer with Decoupled Attention for High-Fidelity Mask-Text Collaborative Facial Generation

While significant progress has been achieved in multimodal facial generation using semantic masks and textual descriptions, conventional feature fusion approaches often fail to enable effective cross-modal interactions, thereby leading to suboptimal generation outcomes. To address this challenge, we introduce MDiTFace--a customized diffusion transformer framework that employs a unified tokenization strategy to process semantic mask and text inputs, eliminating discrepancies between heterogeneous modality representations. The framework facilitates comprehensive multimodal feature interaction through stacked, newly designed multivariate transformer blocks that process all conditions synchronously. Additionally, we design a novel decoupled attention mechanism by dissociating implicit dependencies between mask tokens and temporal embeddings. This mechanism segregates internal computations into dynamic and static pathways, enabling caching and reuse of features computed in static pathways after initial calculation, thereby reducing additional computational overhead introduced by mask condition by over 94% while maintaining performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MDiTFace significantly outperforms other competing methods in terms of both facial fidelity and conditional consistency.

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.