ACCon: Angle-Compensated Contrastive Regularizer for Deep Regression

In deep regression, capturing the relationship among continuous labels in feature space is a fundamental challenge that has attracted increasing interest. Addressing this issue can prevent models from converging to suboptimal solutions across various regression tasks, leading to improved performance, especially for imbalanced regression and under limited sample sizes. However, existing approaches often rely on order-aware representation learning or distance-based weighting. In this paper, we hypothesize a linear negative correlation between label distances and representation similarities in regression tasks. To implement this, we propose an angle-compensated contrastive regularizer for deep regression, which adjusts the cosine distance between anchor and negative samples within the contrastive learning framework. Our method offers a plug-and-play compatible solution that extends most existing contrastive learning methods for regression tasks. Extensive experiments and theoretical analysis demonstrate that our proposed angle-compensated contrastive regularizer not only achieves competitive regression performance but also excels in data efficiency and effectiveness on imbalanced datasets.

CycleFlow: Leveraging Cycle Consistency in Flow Matching for Speaker Style Adaptation

Voice Conversion (VC) aims to convert the style of a source speaker, such as timbre and pitch, to the style of any target speaker while preserving the linguistic content. However, the ground truth of the converted speech does not exist in a non-parallel VC scenario, which induces the train-inference mismatch problem. Moreover, existing methods still have an inaccurate pitch and low speaker adaptation quality, there is a significant disparity in pitch between the source and target speaker style domains. As a result, the models tend to generate speech with hoarseness, posing challenges in achieving high-quality voice conversion. In this study, we propose CycleFlow, a novel VC approach that leverages cycle consistency in conditional flow matching (CFM) for speaker timbre adaptation training on non-parallel data. Furthermore, we design a Dual-CFM based on VoiceCFM and PitchCFM to generate speech and improve speaker pitch adaptation quality. Experiments show that our method can significantly improve speaker similarity, generating natural and higher-quality speech.

Incremental Label Distribution Learning with Scalable Graph Convolutional Networks

Label Distribution Learning (LDL) is an effective approach for handling label ambiguity, as it can analyze all labels at once and indicate the extent to which each label describes a given sample. Most existing LDL methods consider the number of labels to be static. However, in various LDL-specific contexts (e.g., disease diagnosis), the label count grows over time (such as the discovery of new diseases), a factor that existing methods overlook. Learning samples with new labels directly means learning all labels at once, thus wasting more time on the old labels and even risking overfitting the old labels. At the same time, learning new labels by the LDL model means reconstructing the inter-label relationships. How to make use of constructed relationships is also a crucial challenge. To tackle these challenges, we introduce Incremental Label Distribution Learning (ILDL), analyze its key issues regarding training samples and inter-label relationships, and propose Scalable Graph Label Distribution Learning (SGLDL) as a practical framework for implementing ILDL. Specifically, in SGLDL, we develop a New-label-aware Gradient Compensation Loss to speed up the learning of new labels and represent inter-label relationships as a graph to reduce the time required to reconstruct inter-label relationships. Experimental results on the classical LDL dataset show the clear advantages of unique algorithms and illustrate the importance of a dedicated design for the ILDL problem.

ESARM: 3D Emotional Speech-to-Animation via Reward Model from Automatically-Ranked Demonstrations

This paper proposes a novel 3D speech-to-animation (STA) generation framework designed to address the shortcomings of existing models in producing diverse and emotionally resonant animations. Current STA models often generate animations that lack emotional depth and variety, failing to align with human expectations. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel STA model coupled with a reward model. This combination enables the decoupling of emotion and content under audio conditions through a cross-coupling training approach. Additionally, we develop a training methodology that leverages automatic quality evaluation of generated facial animations to guide the reinforcement learning process. This methodology encourages the STA model to explore a broader range of possibilities, resulting in the generation of diverse and emotionally expressive facial animations of superior quality. We conduct extensive empirical experiments on a benchmark dataset, and the results validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in generating high-quality, emotionally rich 3D animations that are better aligned with human preferences.

IDEAW: Robust Neural Audio Watermarking with Invertible Dual-Embedding

The audio watermarking technique embeds messages into audio and accurately extracts messages from the watermarked audio. Traditional methods develop algorithms based on expert experience to embed watermarks into the time-domain or transform-domain of signals. With the development of deep neural networks, deep learning-based neural audio watermarking has emerged. Compared to traditional algorithms, neural audio watermarking achieves better robustness by considering various attacks during training. However, current neural watermarking methods suffer from low capacity and unsatisfactory imperceptibility. Additionally, the issue of watermark locating, which is extremely important and even more pronounced in neural audio watermarking, has not been adequately studied. In this paper, we design a dual-embedding watermarking model for efficient locating. We also consider the impact of the attack layer on the invertible neural network in robustness training, improving the model to enhance both its reasonableness and stability. Experiments show that the proposed model, IDEAW, can withstand various attacks with higher capacity and more efficient locating ability compared to existing methods.

PFID: Privacy First Inference Delegation Framework for LLMs

This paper introduces a novel privacy-preservation framework named PFID for LLMs that addresses critical privacy concerns by localizing user data through model sharding and singular value decomposition. When users are interacting with LLM systems, their prompts could be subject to being exposed to eavesdroppers within or outside LLM system providers who are interested in collecting users' input. In this work, we proposed a framework to camouflage user input, so as to alleviate privacy issues. Our framework proposes to place model shards on the client and the public server, we sent compressed hidden states instead of prompts to and from servers. Clients have held back information that can re-privatized the hidden states so that overall system performance is comparable to traditional LLMs services. Our framework was designed to be communication efficient, computation can be delegated to the local client so that the server's computation burden can be lightened. We conduct extensive experiments on machine translation tasks to verify our framework's performance.

RREH: Reconstruction Relations Embedded Hashing for Semi-Paired Cross-Modal Retrieval

Known for efficient computation and easy storage, hashing has been extensively explored in cross-modal retrieval. The majority of current hashing models are predicated on the premise of a direct one-to-one mapping between data points. However, in real practice, data correspondence across modalities may be partially provided. In this research, we introduce an innovative unsupervised hashing technique designed for semi-paired cross-modal retrieval tasks, named Reconstruction Relations Embedded Hashing (RREH). RREH assumes that multi-modal data share a common subspace. For paired data, RREH explores the latent consistent information of heterogeneous modalities by seeking a shared representation. For unpaired data, to effectively capture the latent discriminative features, the high-order relationships between unpaired data and anchors are embedded into the latent subspace, which are computed by efficient linear reconstruction. The anchors are sampled from paired data, which improves the efficiency of hash learning. The RREH trains the underlying features and the binary encodings in a unified framework with high-order reconstruction relations preserved. With the well devised objective function and discrete optimization algorithm, RREH is designed to be scalable, making it suitable for large-scale datasets and facilitating efficient cross-modal retrieval. In the evaluation process, the proposed is tested with partially paired data to establish its superiority over several existing methods.

Enhancing Emotion Recognition in Conversation through Emotional Cross-Modal Fusion and Inter-class Contrastive Learning

The purpose of emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is to identify the emotion category of an utterance based on contextual information. Previous ERC methods relied on simple connections for cross-modal fusion and ignored the information differences between modalities, resulting in the model being unable to focus on modality-specific emotional information. At the same time, the shared information between modalities was not processed to generate emotions. Information redundancy problem. To overcome these limitations, we propose a cross-modal fusion emotion prediction network based on vector connections. The network mainly includes two stages: the multi-modal feature fusion stage based on connection vectors and the emotion classification stage based on fused features. Furthermore, we design a supervised inter-class contrastive learning module based on emotion labels. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating excellent performance on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets.

RSET: Remapping-based Sorting Method for Emotion Transfer Speech Synthesis

Although current Text-To-Speech (TTS) models are able to generate high-quality speech samples, there are still challenges in developing emotion intensity controllable TTS. Most existing TTS models achieve emotion intensity control by extracting intensity information from reference speeches. Unfortunately, limited by the lack of modeling for intra-class emotion intensity and the model's information decoupling capability, the generated speech cannot achieve fine-grained emotion intensity control and suffers from information leakage issues. In this paper, we propose an emotion transfer TTS model, which defines a remapping-based sorting method to model intra-class relative intensity information, combined with Mutual Information (MI) to decouple speaker and emotion information, and synthesizes expressive speeches with perceptible intensity differences. Experiments show that our model achieves fine-grained emotion control while preserving speaker information.

Task-agnostic Decision Transformer for Multi-type Agent Control with Federated Split Training

With the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, the development of knowledgeable and personalized agents has become increasingly prevalent. However, the inherent variability in state variables and action spaces among personalized agents poses significant aggregation challenges for traditional federated learning algorithms. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Federated Split Decision Transformer (FSDT), an innovative framework designed explicitly for AI agent decision tasks. The FSDT framework excels at navigating the intricacies of personalized agents by harnessing distributed data for training while preserving data privacy. It employs a two-stage training process, with local embedding and prediction models on client agents and a global transformer decoder model on the server. Our comprehensive evaluation using the benchmark D4RL dataset highlights the superior performance of our algorithm in federated split learning for personalized agents, coupled with significant reductions in communication and computational overhead compared to traditional centralized training approaches. The FSDT framework demonstrates strong potential for enabling efficient and privacy-preserving collaborative learning in applications such as autonomous driving decision systems. Our findings underscore the efficacy of the FSDT framework in effectively leveraging distributed offline reinforcement learning data to enable powerful multi-type agent decision systems.