EMOVA: Empowering Language Models to See, Hear and Speak with Vivid Emotions

GPT-4o, an omni-modal model that enables vocal conversations with diverse emotions and tones, marks a milestone for omni-modal foundation models. However, empowering Large Language Models to perceive and generate images, texts, and speeches end-to-end with publicly available data remains challenging in the open-source community. Existing vision-language models rely on external tools for the speech processing, while speech-language models still suffer from limited or even without vision-understanding abilities. To address this gap, we propose EMOVA (EMotionally Omni-present Voice Assistant), to enable Large Language Models with end-to-end speech capabilities while maintaining the leading vision-language performance. With a semantic-acoustic disentangled speech tokenizer, we notice surprisingly that omni-modal alignment can further enhance vision-language and speech abilities compared with the corresponding bi-modal aligned counterparts. Moreover, a lightweight style module is proposed for flexible speech style controls (e.g., emotions and pitches). For the first time, EMOVA achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the vision-language and speech benchmarks, and meanwhile, supporting omni-modal spoken dialogue with vivid emotions.

Toward Robust Diagnosis: A Contour Attention Preserving Adversarial Defense for COVID-19 Detection

As the COVID-19 pandemic puts pressure on healthcare systems worldwide, the computed tomography image based AI diagnostic system has become a sustainable solution for early diagnosis. However, the model-wise vulnerability under adversarial perturbation hinders its deployment in practical situation. The existing adversarial training strategies are difficult to generalized into medical imaging field challenged by complex medical texture features. To overcome this challenge, we propose a Contour Attention Preserving (CAP) method based on lung cavity edge extraction. The contour prior features are injected to attention layer via a parameter regularization and we optimize the robust empirical risk with hybrid distance metric. We then introduce a new cross-nation CT scan dataset to evaluate the generalization capability of the adversarial robustness under distribution shift. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple adversarial defense and generalization tasks. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Quinn777/CAP.