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.

SparseAD: Sparse Query-Centric Paradigm for Efficient End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-End paradigms use a unified framework to implement multi-tasks in an autonomous driving system. Despite simplicity and clarity, the performance of end-to-end autonomous driving methods on sub-tasks is still far behind the single-task methods. Meanwhile, the widely used dense BEV features in previous end-to-end methods make it costly to extend to more modalities or tasks. In this paper, we propose a Sparse query-centric paradigm for end-to-end Autonomous Driving (SparseAD), where the sparse queries completely represent the whole driving scenario across space, time and tasks without any dense BEV representation. Concretely, we design a unified sparse architecture for perception tasks including detection, tracking, and online mapping. Moreover, we revisit motion prediction and planning, and devise a more justifiable motion planner framework. On the challenging nuScenes dataset, SparseAD achieves SOTA full-task performance among end-to-end methods and significantly narrows the performance gap between end-to-end paradigms and single-task methods. Codes will be released soon.

Self-Learning with Rectification Strategy for Human Parsing

In this paper, we solve the sample shortage problem in the human parsing task. We begin with the self-learning strategy, which generates pseudo-labels for unlabeled data to retrain the model. However, directly using noisy pseudo-labels will cause error amplification and accumulation. Considering the topology structure of human body, we propose a trainable graph reasoning method that establishes internal structural connections between graph nodes to correct two typical errors in the pseudo-labels, i.e., the global structural error and the local consistency error. For the global error, we first transform category-wise features into a high-level graph model with coarse-grained structural information, and then decouple the high-level graph to reconstruct the category features. The reconstructed features have a stronger ability to represent the topology structure of the human body. Enlarging the receptive field of features can effectively reducing the local error. We first project feature pixels into a local graph model to capture pixel-wise relations in a hierarchical graph manner, then reverse the relation information back to the pixels. With the global structural and local consistency modules, these errors are rectified and confident pseudo-labels are generated for retraining. Extensive experiments on the LIP and the ATR datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our global and local rectification modules. Our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in supervised human parsing tasks.