Autoregressive Speech Synthesis with Next-Distribution Prediction

We introduce KALL-E, a novel autoregressive (AR) language modeling approach with next-distribution prediction for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. Unlike existing methods, KALL-E directly models and predicts the continuous speech distribution conditioned on text without relying on VAE- or diffusion-based components. Specifically, we use WaveVAE to extract continuous speech distributions from waveforms instead of using discrete speech tokens. A single AR language model predicts these continuous speech distributions from text, with a Kullback-Leibler divergence loss as the constraint. Experimental results show that KALL-E outperforms open-source implementations of YourTTS, VALL-E, NaturalSpeech 2, and CosyVoice in terms of naturalness and speaker similarity in zero-shot TTS scenarios. Moreover, KALL-E demonstrates exceptional zero-shot capabilities in emotion and accent cloning. Importantly, KALL-E presents a more straightforward and effective paradigm for using continuous speech representations in TTS. Audio samples are available at: \url{https://zxf-icpc.github.io/kalle/}.

CAMEL: Cross-Attention Enhanced Mixture-of-Experts and Language Bias for Code-Switching Speech Recognition

Code-switching automatic speech recognition (ASR) aims to transcribe speech that contains two or more languages accurately. To better capture language-specific speech representations and address language confusion in code-switching ASR, the mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture and an additional language diarization (LD) decoder are commonly employed. However, most researches remain stagnant in simple operations like weighted summation or concatenation to fuse language-specific speech representations, leaving significant opportunities to explore the enhancement of integrating language bias information. In this paper, we introduce CAMEL, a cross-attention-based MoE and language bias approach for code-switching ASR. Specifically, after each MoE layer, we fuse language-specific speech representations with cross-attention, leveraging its strong contextual modeling abilities. Additionally, we design a source attention-based mechanism to incorporate the language information from the LD decoder output into text embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SEAME, ASRU200, and ASRU700+LibriSpeech460 Mandarin-English code-switching ASR datasets.

YingSound: Video-Guided Sound Effects Generation with Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought Controls

Generating sound effects for product-level videos, where only a small amount of labeled data is available for diverse scenes, requires the production of high-quality sounds in few-shot settings. To tackle the challenge of limited labeled data in real-world scenes, we introduce YingSound, a foundation model designed for video-guided sound generation that supports high-quality audio generation in few-shot settings. Specifically, YingSound consists of two major modules. The first module uses a conditional flow matching transformer to achieve effective semantic alignment in sound generation across audio and visual modalities. This module aims to build a learnable audio-visual aggregator (AVA) that integrates high-resolution visual features with corresponding audio features at multiple stages. The second module is developed with a proposed multi-modal visual-audio chain-of-thought (CoT) approach to generate finer sound effects in few-shot settings. Finally, an industry-standard video-to-audio (V2A) dataset that encompasses various real-world scenarios is presented. We show that YingSound effectively generates high-quality synchronized sounds across diverse conditional inputs through automated evaluations and human studies. Project Page: \url{https://giantailab.github.io/yingsound/}

StableVC: Style Controllable Zero-Shot Voice Conversion with Conditional Flow Matching

Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to transfer the timbre from the source speaker to an arbitrary unseen speaker while preserving the original linguistic content. Despite recent advancements in zero-shot VC using language model-based or diffusion-based approaches, several challenges remain: 1) current approaches primarily focus on adapting timbre from unseen speakers and are unable to transfer style and timbre to different unseen speakers independently; 2) these approaches often suffer from slower inference speeds due to the autoregressive modeling methods or the need for numerous sampling steps; 3) the quality and similarity of the converted samples are still not fully satisfactory. To address these challenges, we propose a style controllable zero-shot VC approach named StableVC, which aims to transfer timbre and style from source speech to different unseen target speakers. Specifically, we decompose speech into linguistic content, timbre, and style, and then employ a conditional flow matching module to reconstruct the high-quality mel-spectrogram based on these decomposed features. To effectively capture timbre and style in a zero-shot manner, we introduce a novel dual attention mechanism with an adaptive gate, rather than using conventional feature concatenation. With this non-autoregressive design, StableVC can efficiently capture the intricate timbre and style from different unseen speakers and generate high-quality speech significantly faster than real-time. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed StableVC outperforms state-of-the-art baseline systems in zero-shot VC and achieves flexible control over timbre and style from different unseen speakers. Moreover, StableVC offers approximately 25x and 1.65x faster sampling compared to autoregressive and diffusion-based baselines.

SQ-Whisper: Speaker-Querying based Whisper Model for Target-Speaker ASR

Benefiting from massive and diverse data sources, speech foundation models exhibit strong generalization and knowledge transfer capabilities to a wide range of downstream tasks. However, a limitation arises from their exclusive handling of single-speaker speech input, making them ineffective in recognizing multi-speaker overlapped speech, a common occurrence in real-world scenarios. In this study, we delve into the adaptation of speech foundation models to eliminate interfering speakers from overlapping speech and perform target-speaker automatic speech recognition (TS-ASR). Initially, we utilize the Whisper model as the foundation for adaptation and conduct a thorough comparison of its integration with existing target-speaker adaptation techniques. We then propose an innovative model termed Speaker-Querying Whisper (SQ-Whisper), which employs a set number of trainable queries to capture speaker prompts from overlapping speech based on target-speaker enrollment. These prompts serve to steer the model in extracting speaker-specific features and accurately recognizing target-speaker transcriptions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively adapts the pre-trained speech foundation model to TS-ASR. Compared with the robust TS-HuBERT model, the proposed SQ-Whisper significantly improves performance, yielding up to 15% and 10% relative reductions in word error rates (WERs) on the Libri2Mix and WSJ0-2Mix datasets, respectively. With data augmentation, we establish new state-of-the-art WERs of 14.6% on the Libri2Mix Test set and 4.4% on the WSJ0-2Mix Test set. Furthermore, we evaluate our model on the real-world AMI meeting dataset, which shows consistent improvement over other adaptation methods.

CoDiff-VC: A Codec-Assisted Diffusion Model for Zero-shot Voice Conversion

Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to convert the original speaker's timbre to any target speaker while keeping the linguistic content. Current mainstream zero-shot voice conversion approaches depend on pre-trained recognition models to disentangle linguistic content and speaker representation. This results in a timbre residue within the decoupled linguistic content and inadequacies in speaker representation modeling. In this study, we propose CoDiff-VC, an end-to-end framework for zero-shot voice conversion that integrates a speech codec and a diffusion model to produce high-fidelity waveforms. Our approach involves employing a single-codebook codec to separate linguistic content from the source speech. To enhance content disentanglement, we introduce Mix-Style layer normalization (MSLN) to perturb the original timbre. Additionally, we incorporate a multi-scale speaker timbre modeling approach to ensure timbre consistency and improve voice detail similarity. To improve speech quality and speaker similarity, we introduce dual classifier-free guidance, providing both content and timbre guidance during the generation process. Objective and subjective experiments affirm that CoDiff-VC significantly improves speaker similarity, generating natural and higher-quality speech.

Learning-Based On-Track System Identification for Scaled Autonomous Racing in Under a Minute

Accurate tire modeling is crucial for optimizing autonomous racing vehicles, as state-of-the-art (SotA) model-based techniques rely on precise knowledge of the vehicle's parameters. Yet, system identification in dynamic racing conditions is challenging due to varying track and tire conditions. Traditional methods require extensive operational ranges, often impractical in racing scenarios. Machine learning (ML)-based methods, while improving performance, struggle with generalization and depend on accurate initialization. This paper introduces a novel on-track system identification algorithm, incorporating a neural network (NN) for error correction, which is then employed for traditional system identification with virtually generated data. Crucially, the process is iteratively reapplied, with tire parameters updated at each cycle, leading to notable improvements in accuracy in tests on a scaled vehicle. Experiments show that it is possible to learn a tire model without prior knowledge with only 30 seconds of driving data and 3 seconds of training time. This method demonstrates greater one-step prediction accuracy than the baseline nonlinear least squares (NLS) method under noisy conditions, achieving a 3.3x lower root mean square error (RMSE), and yields tire models with comparable accuracy to traditional steady-state system identification. Furthermore, unlike steady-state methods requiring large spaces and specific experimental setups, the proposed approach identifies tire parameters directly on a race track in dynamic racing environments.

MobileMamba: Lightweight Multi-Receptive Visual Mamba Network

Previous research on lightweight models has primarily focused on CNNs and Transformer-based designs. CNNs, with their local receptive fields, struggle to capture long-range dependencies, while Transformers, despite their global modeling capabilities, are limited by quadratic computational complexity in high-resolution scenarios. Recently, state-space models have gained popularity in the visual domain due to their linear computational complexity. Despite their low FLOPs, current lightweight Mamba-based models exhibit suboptimal throughput. In this work, we propose the MobileMamba framework, which balances efficiency and performance. We design a three-stage network to enhance inference speed significantly. At a fine-grained level, we introduce the Multi-Receptive Field Feature Interaction(MRFFI) module, comprising the Long-Range Wavelet Transform-Enhanced Mamba(WTE-Mamba), Efficient Multi-Kernel Depthwise Convolution(MK-DeConv), and Eliminate Redundant Identity components. This module integrates multi-receptive field information and enhances high-frequency detail extraction. Additionally, we employ training and testing strategies to further improve performance and efficiency. MobileMamba achieves up to 83.6% on Top-1, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods which is maximum x21 faster than LocalVim on GPU. Extensive experiments on high-resolution downstream tasks demonstrate that MobileMamba surpasses current efficient models, achieving an optimal balance between speed and accuracy.

Freeze-Omni: A Smart and Low Latency Speech-to-speech Dialogue Model with Frozen LLM

The rapid development of large language models has brought many new smart applications, especially the excellent multimodal human-computer interaction in GPT-4o has brought impressive experience to users. In this background, researchers have proposed many multimodal LLMs that can achieve speech-to-speech dialogue recently. In this paper, we propose a speech-text multimodal LLM architecture called Freeze-Omni. Our main contribution is the speech input and output modalities can connected to the LLM while keeping the LLM frozen throughout the training process. We designed 3-stage training strategies both for the modeling of speech input and output, enabling Freeze-Omni to obtain speech-to-speech dialogue ability using text-speech paired data (such as ASR and TTS data) and only 60,000 multi-round text Q&A data on 8 GPUs. Moreover, we can effectively ensure that the intelligence of the Freeze-Omni in the speech modality is at the same level compared with that in the text modality of its backbone LLM, while the end-to-end latency of the spoken response achieves a low level. In addition, we also designed a method to achieve duplex dialogue ability through multi-task training, making Freeze-Omni have a more natural style of dialogue ability between the users. Freeze-Omni mainly provides a possibility for researchers to conduct multimodal LLM under the condition of a frozen LLM, avoiding various impacts caused by the catastrophic forgetting of LLM caused by fewer data and training resources.

The ISCSLP 2024 Conversational Voice Clone (CoVoC) Challenge: Tasks, Results and Findings

The ISCSLP 2024 Conversational Voice Clone (CoVoC) Challenge aims to benchmark and advance zero-shot spontaneous style voice cloning, particularly focusing on generating spontaneous behaviors in conversational speech. The challenge comprises two tracks: an unconstrained track without limitation on data and model usage, and a constrained track only allowing the use of constrained open-source datasets. A 100-hour high-quality conversational speech dataset is also made available with the challenge. This paper details the data, tracks, submitted systems, evaluation results, and findings.