MEDTalk: Multimodal Controlled 3D Facial Animation with Dynamic Emotions by Disentangled Embedding

Audio-driven emotional 3D facial animation aims to generate synchronized lip movements and vivid facial expressions. However, most existing approaches focus on static and predefined emotion labels, limiting their diversity and naturalness. To address these challenges, we propose MEDTalk, a novel framework for fine-grained and dynamic emotional talking head generation. Our approach first disentangles content and emotion embedding spaces from motion sequences using a carefully designed cross-reconstruction process, enabling independent control over lip movements and facial expressions. Beyond conventional audio-driven lip synchronization, we integrate audio and speech text, predicting frame-wise intensity variations and dynamically adjusting static emotion features to generate realistic emotional expressions. Furthermore, to enhance control and personalization, we incorporate multimodal inputs-including text descriptions and reference expression images-to guide the generation of user-specified facial expressions. With MetaHuman as the priority, our generated results can be conveniently integrated into the industrial production pipeline.

De-AntiFake: Rethinking the Protective Perturbations Against Voice Cloning Attacks

The rapid advancement of speech generation models has heightened privacy and security concerns related to voice cloning (VC). Recent studies have investigated disrupting unauthorized voice cloning by introducing adversarial perturbations. However, determined attackers can mitigate these protective perturbations and successfully execute VC. In this study, we conduct the first systematic evaluation of these protective perturbations against VC under realistic threat models that include perturbation purification. Our findings reveal that while existing purification methods can neutralize a considerable portion of the protective perturbations, they still lead to distortions in the feature space of VC models, which degrades the performance of VC. From this perspective, we propose a novel two-stage purification method: (1) Purify the perturbed speech; (2) Refine it using phoneme guidance to align it with the clean speech distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art purification methods in disrupting VC defenses. Our study reveals the limitations of adversarial perturbation-based VC defenses and underscores the urgent need for more robust solutions to mitigate the security and privacy risks posed by VC. The code and audio samples are available at https://de-antifake.github.io.

LASFNet: A Lightweight Attention-Guided Self-Modulation Feature Fusion Network for Multimodal Object Detection

Effective deep feature extraction via feature-level fusion is crucial for multimodal object detection. However, previous studies often involve complex training processes that integrate modality-specific features by stacking multiple feature-level fusion units, leading to significant computational overhead. To address this issue, we propose a new fusion detection baseline that uses a single feature-level fusion unit to enable high-performance detection, thereby simplifying the training process. Based on this approach, we propose a lightweight attention-guided self-modulation feature fusion network (LASFNet), which introduces a novel attention-guided self-modulation feature fusion (ASFF) module that adaptively adjusts the responses of fusion features at both global and local levels based on attention information from different modalities, thereby promoting comprehensive and enriched feature generation. Additionally, a lightweight feature attention transformation module (FATM) is designed at the neck of LASFNet to enhance the focus on fused features and minimize information loss. Extensive experiments on three representative datasets demonstrate that, compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves a favorable efficiency-accuracy trade-off, reducing the number of parameters and computational cost by as much as 90% and 85%, respectively, while improving detection accuracy (mAP) by 1%-3%. The code will be open-sourced at https://github.com/leileilei2000/LASFNet.

DiscRec: Disentangled Semantic-Collaborative Modeling for Generative Recommendation

Generative recommendation is emerging as a powerful paradigm that directly generates item predictions, moving beyond traditional matching-based approaches. However, current methods face two key challenges: token-item misalignment, where uniform token-level modeling ignores item-level granularity that is critical for collaborative signal learning, and semantic-collaborative signal entanglement, where collaborative and semantic signals exhibit distinct distributions yet are fused in a unified embedding space, leading to conflicting optimization objectives that limit the recommendation performance. To address these issues, we propose DiscRec, a novel framework that enables Disentangled Semantic-Collaborative signal modeling with flexible fusion for generative Recommendation.First, DiscRec introduces item-level position embeddings, assigned based on indices within each semantic ID, enabling explicit modeling of item structure in input token sequences.Second, DiscRec employs a dual-branch module to disentangle the two signals at the embedding layer: a semantic branch encodes semantic signals using original token embeddings, while a collaborative branch applies localized attention restricted to tokens within the same item to effectively capture collaborative signals. A gating mechanism subsequently fuses both branches while preserving the model's ability to model sequential dependencies. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that DiscRec effectively decouples these signals and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our codes are available on https://github.com/Ten-Mao/DiscRec.

Diagnosing and Improving Diffusion Models by Estimating the Optimal Loss Value

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generative modeling. Despite more stable training, the loss of diffusion models is not indicative of absolute data-fitting quality, since its optimal value is typically not zero but unknown, leading to confusion between large optimal loss and insufficient model capacity. In this work, we advocate the need to estimate the optimal loss value for diagnosing and improving diffusion models. We first derive the optimal loss in closed form under a unified formulation of diffusion models, and develop effective estimators for it, including a stochastic variant scalable to large datasets with proper control of variance and bias. With this tool, we unlock the inherent metric for diagnosing the training quality of mainstream diffusion model variants, and develop a more performant training schedule based on the optimal loss. Moreover, using models with 120M to 1.5B parameters, we find that the power law is better demonstrated after subtracting the optimal loss from the actual training loss, suggesting a more principled setting for investigating the scaling law for diffusion models.

Wireless Channel Identification via Conditional Diffusion Model

The identification of channel scenarios in wireless systems plays a crucial role in channel modeling, radio fingerprint positioning, and transceiver design. Traditional methods to classify channel scenarios are based on typical statistical characteristics of channels, such as K-factor, path loss, delay spread, etc. However, statistic-based channel identification methods cannot accurately differentiate implicit features induced by dynamic scatterers, thus performing very poorly in identifying similar channel scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel channel scenario identification method, formulating the identification task as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. Furthermore, the MAP estimation is reformulated by a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), which is then approximated and solved by the conditional generative diffusion model. Specifically, we leverage a transformer network to capture hidden channel features in multiple latent noise spaces within the reverse process of the conditional generative diffusion model. These detailed features, which directly affect likelihood functions in MLE, enable highly accurate scenario identification. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms traditional methods, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), back-propagation neural networks (BPNNs), and random forest-based classifiers, improving the identification accuracy by more than 10%.

Dynamic Collaborative Material Distribution System for Intelligent Robots In Smart Manufacturing

The collaboration and interaction of multiple robots have become integral aspects of smart manufacturing. Effective planning and management play a crucial role in achieving energy savings and minimising overall costs. This paper addresses the real-time Dynamic Multiple Sources to Single Destination (DMS-SD) navigation problem, particularly with a material distribution case for multiple intelligent robots in smart manufacturing. Enumerated solutions, such as in \cite{xiao2022efficient}, tackle the problem by generating as many optimal or near-optimal solutions as possible but do not learn patterns from the previous experience, whereas the method in \cite{xiao2023collaborative} only uses limited information from the earlier trajectories. Consequently, these methods may take a considerable amount of time to compute results on large maps, rendering real-time operations impractical. To overcome this challenge, we propose a lightweight Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) method to address the DMS-SD problem. The proposed DRL method can be efficiently trained and rapidly converges to the optimal solution using the designed target-guided reward function. A well-trained DRL model significantly reduces the computation time for the next movement to a millisecond level, which improves the time up to 100 times in our experiments compared to the enumerated solutions. Moreover, the trained DRL model can be easily deployed on lightweight devices in smart manufacturing, such as Internet of Things devices and mobile phones, which only require limited computational resources.

Agent-based Condition Monitoring Assistance with Multimodal Industrial Database Retrieval Augmented Generation

Condition monitoring (CM) plays a crucial role in ensuring reliability and efficiency in the process industry. Although computerised maintenance systems effectively detect and classify faults, tasks like fault severity estimation, and maintenance decisions still largely depend on human expert analysis. The analysis and decision making automatically performed by current systems typically exhibit considerable uncertainty and high false alarm rates, leading to increased workload and reduced efficiency. This work integrates large language model (LLM)-based reasoning agents with CM workflows to address analyst and industry needs, namely reducing false alarms, enhancing fault severity estimation, improving decision support, and offering explainable interfaces. We propose MindRAG, a modular framework combining multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with novel vector store structures designed specifically for CM data. The framework leverages existing annotations and maintenance work orders as surrogates for labels in a supervised learning protocol, addressing the common challenge of training predictive models on unlabelled and noisy real-world datasets. The primary contributions include: (1) an approach for structuring industry CM data into a semi-structured multimodal vector store compatible with LLM-driven workflows; (2) developing multimodal RAG techniques tailored for CM data; (3) developing practical reasoning agents capable of addressing real-world CM queries; and (4) presenting an experimental framework for integrating and evaluating such agents in realistic industrial scenarios. Preliminary results, evaluated with the help of an experienced analyst, indicate that MindRAG provide meaningful decision support for more efficient management of alarms, thereby improving the interpretability of CM systems.

Solving excited states for long-range interacting trapped ions with neural networks

The computation of excited states in strongly interacting quantum many-body systems is of fundamental importance. Yet, it is notoriously challenging due to the exponential scaling of the Hilbert space dimension with the system size. Here, we introduce a neural network-based algorithm that can simultaneously output multiple low-lying excited states of a quantum many-body spin system in an accurate and efficient fashion. This algorithm, dubbed the neural quantum excited-state (NQES) algorithm, requires no explicit orthogonalization of the states and is generally applicable to higher dimensions. We demonstrate, through concrete examples including the Haldane-Shastry model with all-to-all interactions, that the NQES algorithm is capable of efficiently computing multiple excited states and their related observable expectations. In addition, we apply the NQES algorithm to two classes of long-range interacting trapped-ion systems in a two-dimensional Wigner crystal. For non-decaying all-to-all interactions with alternating signs, our computed low-lying excited states bear spatial correlation patterns similar to those of the ground states, which closely match recent experimental observations that the quasi-adiabatically prepared state accurately reproduces analytical ground-state correlations. For a system of up to 300 ions with power-law decaying antiferromagnetic interactions, we successfully uncover its gap scaling and correlation features. Our results establish a scalable and efficient algorithm for computing excited states of interacting quantum many-body systems, which holds potential applications ranging from benchmarking quantum devices to photoisomerization.

PhysiInter: Integrating Physical Mapping for High-Fidelity Human Interaction Generation

Driven by advancements in motion capture and generative artificial intelligence, leveraging large-scale MoCap datasets to train generative models for synthesizing diverse, realistic human motions has become a promising research direction. However, existing motion-capture techniques and generative models often neglect physical constraints, leading to artifacts such as interpenetration, sliding, and floating. These issues are exacerbated in multi-person motion generation, where complex interactions are involved. To address these limitations, we introduce physical mapping, integrated throughout the human interaction generation pipeline. Specifically, motion imitation within a physics-based simulation environment is used to project target motions into a physically valid space. The resulting motions are adjusted to adhere to real-world physics constraints while retaining their original semantic meaning. This mapping not only improves MoCap data quality but also directly informs post-processing of generated motions. Given the unique interactivity of multi-person scenarios, we propose a tailored motion representation framework. Motion Consistency (MC) and Marker-based Interaction (MI) loss functions are introduced to improve model performance. Experiments show our method achieves impressive results in generated human motion quality, with a 3%-89% improvement in physical fidelity. Project page http://yw0208.github.io/physiinter