KramaBench: A Benchmark for AI Systems on Data-to-Insight Pipelines over Data Lakes

Constructing real-world data-to-insight pipelines often involves data extraction from data lakes, data integration across heterogeneous data sources, and diverse operations from data cleaning to analysis. The design and implementation of data science pipelines require domain knowledge, technical expertise, and even project-specific insights. AI systems have shown remarkable reasoning, coding, and understanding capabilities. However, it remains unclear to what extent these capabilities translate into successful design and execution of such complex pipelines. We introduce KRAMABENCH: a benchmark composed of 104 manually-curated real-world data science pipelines spanning 1700 data files from 24 data sources in 6 different domains. We show that these pipelines test the end-to-end capabilities of AI systems on data processing, requiring data discovery, wrangling and cleaning, efficient processing, statistical reasoning, and orchestrating data processing steps given a high-level task. Our evaluation tests 5 general models and 3 code generation models using our reference framework, DS-GURU, which instructs the AI model to decompose a question into a sequence of subtasks, reason through each step, and synthesize Python code that implements the proposed design. Our results on KRAMABENCH show that, although the models are sufficiently capable of solving well-specified data science code generation tasks, when extensive data processing and domain knowledge are required to construct real-world data science pipelines, existing out-of-box models fall short. Progress on KramaBench represents crucial steps towards developing autonomous data science agents for real-world applications. Our code, reference framework, and data are available at https://github.com/mitdbg/KramaBench.

Decomposability-Guaranteed Cooperative Coevolution for Large-Scale Itinerary Planning

Large-scale itinerary planning is a variant of the traveling salesman problem, aiming to determine an optimal path that maximizes the collected points of interest (POIs) scores while minimizing travel time and cost, subject to travel duration constraints. This paper analyzes the decomposability of large-scale itinerary planning, proving that strict decomposability is difficult to satisfy, and introduces a weak decomposability definition based on a necessary condition, deriving the corresponding graph structures that fulfill this property. With decomposability guaranteed, we propose a novel multi-objective cooperative coevolutionary algorithm for large-scale itinerary planning, addressing the challenges of component imbalance and interactions. Specifically, we design a dynamic decomposition strategy based on the normalized fitness within each component, define optimization potential considering component scale and contribution, and develop a computational resource allocation strategy. Finally, we evaluate the proposed algorithm on a set of real-world datasets. Comparative experiments with state-of-the-art multi-objective itinerary planning algorithms demonstrate the superiority of our approach, with performance advantages increasing as the problem scale grows.

Decoding Speaker-Normalized Pitch from EEG for Mandarin Perception

The same speech content produced by different speakers exhibits significant differences in pitch contour, yet listeners' semantic perception remains unaffected. This phenomenon may stem from the brain's perception of pitch contours being independent of individual speakers' pitch ranges. In this work, we recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) while participants listened to Mandarin monosyllables with varying tones, phonemes, and speakers. The CE-ViViT model is proposed to decode raw or speaker-normalized pitch contours directly from EEG. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can decode pitch contours with modest errors, achieving performance comparable to state-of-the-art EEG regression methods. Moreover, speaker-normalized pitch contours were decoded more accurately, supporting the neural encoding of relative pitch.

ADD: Physics-Based Motion Imitation with Adversarial Differential Discriminators

Multi-objective optimization problems, which require the simultaneous optimization of multiple terms, are prevalent across numerous applications. Existing multi-objective optimization methods often rely on manually tuned aggregation functions to formulate a joint optimization target. The performance of such hand-tuned methods is heavily dependent on careful weight selection, a time-consuming and laborious process. These limitations also arise in the setting of reinforcement-learning-based motion tracking for physically simulated characters, where intricately crafted reward functions are typically used to achieve high-fidelity results. Such solutions not only require domain expertise and significant manual adjustment, but also limit the applicability of the resulting reward function across diverse skills. To bridge this gap, we present a novel adversarial multi-objective optimization technique that is broadly applicable to a range of multi-objective optimization problems, including motion tracking. The proposed adversarial differential discriminator receives a single positive sample, yet is still effective at guiding the optimization process. We demonstrate that our technique can enable characters to closely replicate a variety of acrobatic and agile behaviors, achieving comparable quality to state-of-the-art motion-tracking methods, without relying on manually tuned reward functions. Results are best visualized through https://youtu.be/rz8BYCE9E2w.

Spark-TTS: An Efficient LLM-Based Text-to-Speech Model with Single-Stream Decoupled Speech Tokens

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. However, existing foundation models rely on multi-stage processing or complex architectures for predicting multiple codebooks, limiting efficiency and integration flexibility. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Spark-TTS, a novel system powered by BiCodec, a single-stream speech codec that decomposes speech into two complementary token types: low-bitrate semantic tokens for linguistic content and fixed-length global tokens for speaker attributes. This disentangled representation, combined with the Qwen2.5 LLM and a chain-of-thought (CoT) generation approach, enables both coarse-grained control (e.g., gender, speaking style) and fine-grained adjustments (e.g., precise pitch values, speaking rate). To facilitate research in controllable TTS, we introduce VoxBox, a meticulously curated 100,000-hour dataset with comprehensive attribute annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spark-TTS not only achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot voice cloning but also generates highly customizable voices that surpass the limitations of reference-based synthesis. Source code, pre-trained models, and audio samples are available at https://github.com/SparkAudio/Spark-TTS.

Narrative-Driven Travel Planning: Geoculturally-Grounded Script Generation with Evolutionary Itinerary Optimization

To enhance tourists' experiences and immersion, this paper proposes a narrative-driven travel planning framework called NarrativeGuide, which generates a geoculturally-grounded narrative script for travelers, offering a novel, role-playing experience for their journey. In the initial stage, NarrativeGuide constructs a knowledge graph for attractions within a city, then configures the worldview, character setting, and exposition based on the knowledge graph. Using this foundation, the knowledge graph is combined to generate an independent scene unit for each attraction. During the itinerary planning stage, NarrativeGuide models narrative-driven travel planning as an optimization problem, utilizing a genetic algorithm (GA) to refine the itinerary. Before evaluating the candidate itinerary, transition scripts are generated for each pair of adjacent attractions, which, along with the scene units, form a complete script. The weighted sum of script coherence, travel time, and attraction scores is then used as the fitness value to update the candidate solution set. Experimental results across four cities, i.e., Nanjing and Yangzhou in China, Paris in France, and Berlin in Germany, demonstrate significant improvements in narrative coherence and cultural fit, alongside a notable reduction in travel time and an increase in the quality of visited attractions. Our study highlights that incorporating external evolutionary optimization effectively addresses the limitations of large language models in travel planning.Our codes are available at https://github.com/Evan01225/Narrative-Driven-Travel-Planning.

Quadratic Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and Detailed Surface Reconstruction

Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has attracted attention for its superior rendering quality and speed over Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). To address 3DGS's limitations in surface representation, 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) introduced disks as scene primitives to model and reconstruct geometries from multi-view images, offering view-consistent geometry. However, the disk's first-order linear approximation often leads to over-smoothed results. We propose Quadratic Gaussian Splatting (QGS), a novel method that replaces disks with quadric surfaces, enhancing geometric fitting, whose code will be open-sourced. QGS defines Gaussian distributions in non-Euclidean space, allowing primitives to capture more complex textures. As a second-order surface approximation, QGS also renders spatial curvature to guide the normal consistency term, to effectively reduce over-smoothing. Moreover, QGS is a generalized version of 2DGS that achieves more accurate and detailed reconstructions, as verified by experiments on DTU and TNT, demonstrating its effectiveness in surpassing current state-of-the-art methods in geometry reconstruction. Our code willbe released as open source.

The NPU-HWC System for the ISCSLP 2024 Inspirational and Convincing Audio Generation Challenge

This paper presents the NPU-HWC system submitted to the ISCSLP 2024 Inspirational and Convincing Audio Generation Challenge 2024 (ICAGC). Our system consists of two modules: a speech generator for Track 1 and a background audio generator for Track 2. In Track 1, we employ Single-Codec to tokenize the speech into discrete tokens and use a language-model-based approach to achieve zero-shot speaking style cloning. The Single-Codec effectively decouples timbre and speaking style at the token level, reducing the acoustic modeling burden on the autoregressive language model. Additionally, we use DSPGAN to upsample 16 kHz mel-spectrograms to high-fidelity 48 kHz waveforms. In Track 2, we propose a background audio generator based on large language models (LLMs). This system produces scene-appropriate accompaniment descriptions, synthesizes background audio with Tango 2, and integrates it with the speech generated by our Track 1 system. Our submission achieves the second place and the first place in Track 1 and Track 2 respectively.

Prepared for the Worst: A Learning-Based Adversarial Attack for Resilience Analysis of the ICP Algorithm

This paper presents a novel method to assess the resilience of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm via deep-learning-based attacks on lidar point clouds. For safety-critical applications such as autonomous navigation, ensuring the resilience of algorithms prior to deployments is of utmost importance. The ICP algorithm has become the standard for lidar-based localization. However, the pose estimate it produces can be greatly affected by corruption in the measurements. Corruption can arise from a variety of scenarios such as occlusions, adverse weather, or mechanical issues in the sensor. Unfortunately, the complex and iterative nature of ICP makes assessing its resilience to corruption challenging. While there have been efforts to create challenging datasets and develop simulations to evaluate the resilience of ICP empirically, our method focuses on finding the maximum possible ICP pose error using perturbation-based adversarial attacks. The proposed attack induces significant pose errors on ICP and outperforms baselines more than 88% of the time across a wide range of scenarios. As an example application, we demonstrate that our attack can be used to identify areas on a map where ICP is particularly vulnerable to corruption in the measurements.

SST-ReversibleNet: Reversible-prior-based Spectral-Spatial Transformer for Efficient Hyperspectral Image Reconstruction

Spectral image reconstruction is an important task in snapshot compressed imaging. This paper aims to propose a new end-to-end framework with iterative capabilities similar to a deep unfolding network to improve reconstruction accuracy, independent of optimization conditions, and to reduce the number of parameters. A novel framework called the reversible-prior-based method is proposed. Inspired by the reversibility of the optical path, the reversible-prior-based framework projects the reconstructions back into the measurement space, and then the residuals between the projected data and the real measurements are fed into the network for iteration. The reconstruction subnet in the network then learns the mapping of the residuals to the true values to improve reconstruction accuracy. In addition, a novel spectral-spatial transformer is proposed to account for the global correlation of spectral data in both spatial and spectral dimensions while balancing network depth and computational complexity, in response to the shortcomings of existing transformer-based denoising modules that ignore spatial texture features or learn local spatial features at the expense of global spatial features. Extensive experiments show that our SST-ReversibleNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on simulated and real HSI datasets, while requiring lower computational and storage costs. https://github.com/caizeyu1992/SST