Disentangling Age and Identity with a Mutual Information Minimization Approach for Cross-Age Speaker Verification

There has been an increasing research interest in cross-age speaker verification~(CASV). However, existing speaker verification systems perform poorly in CASV due to the great individual differences in voice caused by aging. In this paper, we propose a disentangled representation learning framework for CASV based on mutual information~(MI) minimization. In our method, a backbone model is trained to disentangle the identity- and age-related embeddings from speaker information, and an MI estimator is trained to minimize the correlation between age- and identity-related embeddings via MI minimization, resulting in age-invariant speaker embeddings. Furthermore, by using the age gaps between positive and negative samples, we propose an aging-aware MI minimization loss function that allows the backbone model to focus more on the vocal changes with large age gaps. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other methods on multiple Cross-Age test sets of Vox-CA.

Zero-Shot Sing Voice Conversion: built upon clustering-based phoneme representations

This study presents an innovative Zero-Shot any-to-any Singing Voice Conversion (SVC) method, leveraging a novel clustering-based phoneme representation to effectively separate content, timbre, and singing style. This approach enables precise voice characteristic manipulation. We discovered that datasets with fewer recordings per artist are more susceptible to timbre leakage. Extensive testing on over 10,000 hours of singing and user feedback revealed our model significantly improves sound quality and timbre accuracy, aligning with our objectives and advancing voice conversion technology. Furthermore, this research advances zero-shot SVC and sets the stage for future work on discrete speech representation, emphasizing the preservation of rhyme.

LogicGame: Benchmarking Rule-Based Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable capabilities across various tasks, showcasing complex problem-solving abilities. Understanding and executing complex rules, along with multi-step planning, are fundamental to logical reasoning and critical for practical LLM agents and decision-making systems. However, evaluating LLMs as effective rule-based executors and planners remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce LogicGame, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the comprehensive rule understanding, execution, and planning capabilities of LLMs. Unlike traditional benchmarks, LogicGame provides diverse games that contain a series of rules with an initial state, requiring models to comprehend and apply predefined regulations to solve problems. We create simulated scenarios in which models execute or plan operations to achieve specific outcomes. These game scenarios are specifically designed to distinguish logical reasoning from mere knowledge by relying exclusively on predefined rules. This separation allows for a pure assessment of rule-based reasoning capabilities. The evaluation considers not only final outcomes but also intermediate steps, providing a comprehensive assessment of model performance. Moreover, these intermediate steps are deterministic and can be automatically verified. LogicGame defines game scenarios with varying difficulty levels, from simple rule applications to complex reasoning chains, in order to offer a precise evaluation of model performance on rule understanding and multi-step execution. Utilizing LogicGame, we test various LLMs and identify notable shortcomings in their rule-based logical reasoning abilities.

Benchmarking Complex Instruction-Following with Multiple Constraints Composition

Instruction following is one of the fundamental capabilities of large language models (LLMs). As the ability of LLMs is constantly improving, they have been increasingly applied to deal with complex human instructions in real-world scenarios. Therefore, how to evaluate the ability of complex instruction-following of LLMs has become a critical research problem. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on modeling different types of constraints in human instructions while neglecting the composition of different constraints, which is an indispensable constituent in complex instructions. To this end, we propose ComplexBench, a benchmark for comprehensively evaluating the ability of LLMs to follow complex instructions composed of multiple constraints. We propose a hierarchical taxonomy for complex instructions, including 4 constraint types, 19 constraint dimensions, and 4 composition types, and manually collect a high-quality dataset accordingly. To make the evaluation reliable, we augment LLM-based evaluators with rules to effectively verify whether generated texts can satisfy each constraint and composition. Furthermore, we obtain the final evaluation score based on the dependency structure determined by different composition types. ComplexBench identifies significant deficiencies in existing LLMs when dealing with complex instructions with multiple constraints composition.

HARIS: Human-Like Attention for Reference Image Segmentation

Referring image segmentation (RIS) aims to locate the particular region corresponding to the language expression. Existing methods incorporate features from different modalities in a \emph{bottom-up} manner. This design may get some unnecessary image-text pairs, which leads to an inaccurate segmentation mask. In this paper, we propose a referring image segmentation method called HARIS, which introduces the Human-Like Attention mechanism and uses the parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) framework. To be specific, the Human-Like Attention gets a \emph{feedback} signal from multi-modal features, which makes the network center on the specific objects and discard the irrelevant image-text pairs. Besides, we introduce the PEFT framework to preserve the zero-shot ability of pre-trained encoders. Extensive experiments on three widely used RIS benchmarks and the PhraseCut dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and great zero-shot ability.

Towards Better Adversarial Purification via Adversarial Denoising Diffusion Training

Recently, diffusion-based purification (DBP) has emerged as a promising approach for defending against adversarial attacks. However, previous studies have used questionable methods to evaluate the robustness of DBP models, their explanations of DBP robustness also lack experimental support. We re-examine DBP robustness using precise gradient, and discuss the impact of stochasticity on DBP robustness. To better explain DBP robustness, we assess DBP robustness under a novel attack setting, Deterministic White-box, and pinpoint stochasticity as the main factor in DBP robustness. Our results suggest that DBP models rely on stochasticity to evade the most effective attack direction, rather than directly countering adversarial perturbations. To improve the robustness of DBP models, we propose Adversarial Denoising Diffusion Training (ADDT). This technique uses Classifier-Guided Perturbation Optimization (CGPO) to generate adversarial perturbation through guidance from a pre-trained classifier, and uses Rank-Based Gaussian Mapping (RBGM) to convert adversarial pertubation into a normal Gaussian distribution. Empirical results show that ADDT improves the robustness of DBP models. Further experiments confirm that ADDT equips DBP models with the ability to directly counter adversarial perturbations.

Extreme Video Compression with Pre-trained Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating high quality image and video data. More recently, they have also been used for image compression with high perceptual quality. In this paper, we present a novel approach to extreme video compression leveraging the predictive power of diffusion-based generative models at the decoder. The conditional diffusion model takes several neural compressed frames and generates subsequent frames. When the reconstruction quality drops below the desired level, new frames are encoded to restart prediction. The entire video is sequentially encoded to achieve a visually pleasing reconstruction, considering perceptual quality metrics such as the learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) and the Frechet video distance (FVD), at bit rates as low as 0.02 bits per pixel (bpp). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme compared to standard codecs such as H.264 and H.265 in the low bpp regime. The results showcase the potential of exploiting the temporal relations in video data using generative models. Code is available at: https://github.com/ElesionKyrie/Extreme-Video-Compression-With-Prediction-Using-Pre-trainded-Diffusion-Models-

Passive Beamforming For Practical RIS-Assisted Communication Systems With Non-Ideal Hardware

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology is a promising solution to improve the performance of existing wireless communications. To achieve its cost-effectiveness advantage, there inevitably exist certain hardware impairments in the system. Therefore, it is more reasonable to design passive beamforming in this scenario. Some existing research has considered such problems under transceiver impairments. However, their performance still leaves room for improvement, possibly due to their algorithms not properly handling the fractional structure of the objective function. To address this, the passive beamforming is redesigned in this correspondence paper, taking into account both transceiver impairments and the practical phase-shift model. We tackle the fractional structure of the problem by employing the quadratic transform. The remaining sub-problems are addressed utilizing the penalty-based method and the difference-of-convex programming. Since we provide closed-form solutions for all sub-problems, our algorithm is highly efficient. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm.

MARIS: Referring Image Segmentation via Mutual-Aware Attention Features

Referring image segmentation (RIS) aims to segment a particular region based on a language expression prompt. Existing methods incorporate linguistic features into visual features and obtain multi-modal features for mask decoding. However, these methods may segment the visually salient entity instead of the correct referring region, as the multi-modal features are dominated by the abundant visual context. In this paper, we propose MARIS, a referring image segmentation method that leverages the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and introduces a mutual-aware attention mechanism to enhance the cross-modal fusion via two parallel branches. Specifically, our mutual-aware attention mechanism consists of Vision-Guided Attention and Language-Guided Attention, which bidirectionally model the relationship between visual and linguistic features. Correspondingly, we design a Mask Decoder to enable explicit linguistic guidance for more consistent segmentation with the language expression. To this end, a multi-modal query token is proposed to integrate linguistic information and interact with visual information simultaneously. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art RIS methods. Our code will be publicly available.

Image Reconstruction for Accelerated MR Scan with Faster Fourier Convolutional Neural Networks

Partial scan is a common approach to accelerate Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data acquisition in both 2D and 3D settings. However, accurately reconstructing images from partial scan data (i.e., incomplete k-space matrices) remains challenging due to lack of an effectively global receptive field in both spatial and k-space domains. To address this problem, we propose the following: (1) a novel convolutional operator called Faster Fourier Convolution (FasterFC) to replace the two consecutive convolution operations typically used in convolutional neural networks (e.g., U-Net, ResNet). Based on the spectral convolution theorem in Fourier theory, FasterFC employs alternating kernels of size 1 in 3D case) in different domains to extend the dual-domain receptive field to the global and achieves faster calculation speed than traditional Fast Fourier Convolution (FFC). (2) A 2D accelerated MRI method, FasterFC-End-to-End-VarNet, which uses FasterFC to improve the sensitivity maps and reconstruction quality. (3) A multi-stage 3D accelerated MRI method called FasterFC-based Single-to-group Network (FAS-Net) that utilizes a single-to-group algorithm to guide k-space domain reconstruction, followed by FasterFC-based cascaded convolutional neural networks to expand the effective receptive field in the dual-domain. Experimental results on the fastMRI and Stanford MRI Data datasets demonstrate that FasterFC improves the quality of both 2D and 3D reconstruction. Moreover, FAS-Net, as a 3D high-resolution multi-coil (eight) accelerated MRI method, achieves superior reconstruction performance in both qualitative and quantitative results compared with state-of-the-art 2D and 3D methods.