WenetSpeech-Wu: Datasets, Benchmarks, and Models for a Unified Chinese Wu Dialect Speech Processing Ecosystem

Speech processing for low-resource dialects remains a fundamental challenge in developing inclusive and robust speech technologies. Despite its linguistic significance and large speaker population, the Wu dialect of Chinese has long been hindered by the lack of large-scale speech data, standardized evaluation benchmarks, and publicly available models. In this work, we present WenetSpeech-Wu, the first large-scale, multi-dimensionally annotated open-source speech corpus for the Wu dialect, comprising approximately 8,000 hours of diverse speech data. Building upon this dataset, we introduce WenetSpeech-Wu-Bench, the first standardized and publicly accessible benchmark for systematic evaluation of Wu dialect speech processing, covering automatic speech recognition (ASR), Wu-to-Mandarin translation, speaker attribute prediction, speech emotion recognition, text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, and instruction-following TTS (instruct TTS). Furthermore, we release a suite of strong open-source models trained on WenetSpeech-Wu, establishing competitive performance across multiple tasks and empirically validating the effectiveness of the proposed dataset. Together, these contributions lay the foundation for a comprehensive Wu dialect speech processing ecosystem, and we open-source proposed datasets, benchmarks, and models to support future research on dialectal speech intelligence.

VoiceSculptor: Your Voice, Designed By You

Despite rapid progress in text-to-speech (TTS), open-source systems still lack truly instruction-following, fine-grained control over core speech attributes (e.g., pitch, speaking rate, age, emotion, and style). We present VoiceSculptor, an open-source unified system that bridges this gap by integrating instruction-based voice design and high-fidelity voice cloning in a single framework. It generates controllable speaker timbre directly from natural-language descriptions, supports iterative refinement via Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and provides attribute-level edits across multiple dimensions. The designed voice is then rendered into a prompt waveform and fed into a cloning model to enable high-fidelity timbre transfer for downstream speech synthesis. VoiceSculptor achieves open-source state-of-the-art (SOTA) on InstructTTSEval-Zh, and is fully open-sourced, including code and pretrained models, to advance reproducible instruction-controlled TTS research.

XEmoRAG: Cross-Lingual Emotion Transfer with Controllable Intensity Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Zero-shot emotion transfer in cross-lingual speech synthesis refers to generating speech in a target language, where the emotion is expressed based on reference speech from a different source language. However, this task remains challenging due to the scarcity of parallel multilingual emotional corpora, the presence of foreign accent artifacts, and the difficulty of separating emotion from language-specific prosodic features. In this paper, we propose XEmoRAG, a novel framework to enable zero-shot emotion transfer from Chinese to Thai using a large language model (LLM)-based model, without relying on parallel emotional data. XEmoRAG extracts language-agnostic emotional embeddings from Chinese speech and retrieves emotionally matched Thai utterances from a curated emotional database, enabling controllable emotion transfer without explicit emotion labels. Additionally, a flow-matching alignment module minimizes pitch and duration mismatches, ensuring natural prosody. It also blends Chinese timbre into the Thai synthesis, enhancing rhythmic accuracy and emotional expression, while preserving speaker characteristics and emotional consistency. Experimental results show that XEmoRAG synthesizes expressive and natural Thai speech using only Chinese reference audio, without requiring explicit emotion labels. These results highlight XEmoRAG's capability to achieve flexible and low-resource emotional transfer across languages. Our demo is available at https://tlzuo-lesley.github.io/Demo-page/ .

FleSpeech: Flexibly Controllable Speech Generation with Various Prompts

Controllable speech generation methods typically rely on single or fixed prompts, hindering creativity and flexibility. These limitations make it difficult to meet specific user needs in certain scenarios, such as adjusting the style while preserving a selected speaker's timbre, or choosing a style and generating a voice that matches a character's visual appearance. To overcome these challenges, we propose \textit{FleSpeech}, a novel multi-stage speech generation framework that allows for more flexible manipulation of speech attributes by integrating various forms of control. FleSpeech employs a multimodal prompt encoder that processes and unifies different text, audio, and visual prompts into a cohesive representation. This approach enhances the adaptability of speech synthesis and supports creative and precise control over the generated speech. Additionally, we develop a data collection pipeline for multimodal datasets to facilitate further research and applications in this field. Comprehensive subjective and objective experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FleSpeech. Audio samples are available at https://kkksuper.github.io/FleSpeech/

R-ODE: Ricci Curvature Tells When You Will be Informed

Information diffusion prediction is fundamental to understand the structure and organization of the online social networks, and plays a crucial role to blocking rumor spread, influence maximization, political propaganda, etc. So far, most existing solutions primarily predict the next user who will be informed with historical cascades, but ignore an important factor in the diffusion process - the time. Such limitation motivates us to pose the problem of the time-aware personalized information diffusion prediction for the first time, telling the time when the target user will be informed. In this paper, we address this problem from a fresh geometric perspective of Ricci curvature, and propose a novel Ricci-curvature regulated Ordinary Differential Equation (R-ODE). In the diffusion process, R-ODE considers that the inter-correlated users are organized in a dynamic system in the representation space, and the cascades give the observations sampled from the continuous realm. At each infection time, the message diffuses along the largest Ricci curvature, signifying less transportation effort. In the continuous realm, the message triggers users' movement, whose trajectory in the space is parameterized by an ODE with graph neural network. Consequently, R-ODE predicts the infection time of a target user by the movement trajectory learnt from the observations. Extensive experiments evaluate the personalized time prediction ability of R-ODE, and show R-ODE outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.