Simulating Human-like Daily Activities with Desire-driven Autonomy

Existing task-oriented AI agents often depend on explicit instructions or external rewards, limiting their ability to be driven by intrinsic motivations like humans. In this paper, we present a desire-driven autonomy framework to guide a Large Language Model-based (LLM-based) agent to simulate human-like daily activities. In contrast to previous agents, our Desire-driven Autonomous Agent (D2A) operates on the principle of intrinsic desire, allowing it to propose and select tasks that fulfill its motivational framework autonomously. Inspired by the Theory of Needs, the motivational framework incorporates an understanding of human-like desires, such as the need for social interaction, personal fulfillment, and self-care. Utilizing a desire-driven task generation mechanism, the agent evaluates its current state and takes a sequence of activities aligned with its intrinsic motivations. Through simulations, we demonstrate that our Desire-driven Autonomous Agent (D2A) generates coherent, contextually relevant daily activities while exhibiting variability and adaptability similar to human behavior. A comparative analysis with other LLM-based frameworks demonstrates that our approach significantly enhances the rationality of the simulated activities.

FreeCodec: A disentangled neural speech codec with fewer tokens

Neural speech codecs have gained great attention for their outstanding reconstruction with discrete token representations. It is a crucial component in generative tasks such as speech coding and large language models (LLM). However, most works based on residual vector quantization perform worse with fewer tokens due to low coding efficiency for modeling complex coupled information. In this paper, we propose a neural speech codec named FreeCodec which employs a more effective encoding framework by decomposing intrinsic properties of speech into different components: 1) a global vector is extracted as the timbre information, 2) a prosody encoder with a long stride level is used to model the prosody information, 3) the content information is from a content encoder. Using different training strategies, FreeCodec achieves state-of-the-art performance in reconstruction and disentanglement scenarios. Results from subjective and objective experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods.

HUPE: Heuristic Underwater Perceptual Enhancement with Semantic Collaborative Learning

Underwater images are often affected by light refraction and absorption, reducing visibility and interfering with subsequent applications. Existing underwater image enhancement methods primarily focus on improving visual quality while overlooking practical implications. To strike a balance between visual quality and application, we propose a heuristic invertible network for underwater perception enhancement, dubbed HUPE, which enhances visual quality and demonstrates flexibility in handling other downstream tasks. Specifically, we introduced an information-preserving reversible transformation with embedded Fourier transform to establish a bidirectional mapping between underwater images and their clear images. Additionally, a heuristic prior is incorporated into the enhancement process to better capture scene information. To further bridge the feature gap between vision-based enhancement images and application-oriented images, a semantic collaborative learning module is applied in the joint optimization process of the visual enhancement task and the downstream task, which guides the proposed enhancement model to extract more task-oriented semantic features while obtaining visually pleasing images. Extensive experiments, both quantitative and qualitative, demonstrate the superiority of our HUPE over state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/ZengxiZhang/HUPE.

PCDreamer: Point Cloud Completion Through Multi-view Diffusion Priors

This paper presents PCDreamer, a novel method for point cloud completion. Traditional methods typically extract features from partial point clouds to predict missing regions, but the large solution space often leads to unsatisfactory results. More recent approaches have started to use images as extra guidance, effectively improving performance, but obtaining paired data of images and partial point clouds is challenging in practice. To overcome these limitations, we harness the relatively view-consistent multi-view diffusion priors within large models, to generate novel views of the desired shape. The resulting image set encodes both global and local shape cues, which is especially beneficial for shape completion. To fully exploit the priors, we have designed a shape fusion module for producing an initial complete shape from multi-modality input (\ie, images and point clouds), and a follow-up shape consolidation module to obtain the final complete shape by discarding unreliable points introduced by the inconsistency from diffusion priors. Extensive experimental results demonstrate our superior performance, especially in recovering fine details.

Contourlet Refinement Gate Framework for Thermal Spectrum Distribution Regularized Infrared Image Super-Resolution

Image super-resolution (SR) is a classical yet still active low-level vision problem that aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from their low-resolution (LR) counterparts, serving as a key technique for image enhancement. Current approaches to address SR tasks, such as transformer-based and diffusion-based methods, are either dedicated to extracting RGB image features or assuming similar degradation patterns, neglecting the inherent modal disparities between infrared and visible images. When directly applied to infrared image SR tasks, these methods inevitably distort the infrared spectral distribution, compromising the machine perception in downstream tasks. In this work, we emphasize the infrared spectral distribution fidelity and propose a Contourlet refinement gate framework to restore infrared modal-specific features while preserving spectral distribution fidelity. Our approach captures high-pass subbands from multi-scale and multi-directional infrared spectral decomposition to recover infrared-degraded information through a gate architecture. The proposed Spectral Fidelity Loss regularizes the spectral frequency distribution during reconstruction, which ensures the preservation of both high- and low-frequency components and maintains the fidelity of infrared-specific features. We propose a two-stage prompt-learning optimization to guide the model in learning infrared HR characteristics from LR degradation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing image SR models in both visual and perceptual tasks while notably enhancing machine perception in downstream tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/hey-it-s-me/CoRPLE.

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.

Monge-Ampere Regularization for Learning Arbitrary Shapes from Point Clouds

As commonly used implicit geometry representations, the signed distance function (SDF) is limited to modeling watertight shapes, while the unsigned distance function (UDF) is capable of representing various surfaces. However, its inherent theoretical shortcoming, i.e., the non-differentiability at the zero level set, would result in sub-optimal reconstruction quality. In this paper, we propose the scaled-squared distance function (S$^{2}$DF), a novel implicit surface representation for modeling arbitrary surface types. S$^{2}$DF does not distinguish between inside and outside regions while effectively addressing the non-differentiability issue of UDF at the zero level set. We demonstrate that S$^{2}$DF satisfies a second-order partial differential equation of Monge-Ampere-type, allowing us to develop a learning pipeline that leverages a novel Monge-Ampere regularization to directly learn S$^{2}$DF from raw unoriented point clouds without supervision from ground-truth S$^{2}$DF values. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art supervised approaches that require ground-truth surface information as supervision for training. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/chuanxiang-yang/S2DF.

A Transcription Prompt-based Efficient Audio Large Language Model for Robust Speech Recognition

Audio-LLM introduces audio modality into a large language model (LLM) to enable a powerful LLM to recognize, understand, and generate audio. However, during speech recognition in noisy environments, we observed the presence of illusions and repetition issues in audio-LLM, leading to substitution and insertion errors. This paper proposes a transcription prompt-based audio-LLM by introducing an ASR expert as a transcription tokenizer and a hybrid Autoregressive (AR) Non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding approach to solve the above problems. Experiments on 10k-hour WenetSpeech Mandarin corpus show that our approach decreases 12.2% and 9.6% CER relatively on Test_Net and Test_Meeting evaluation sets compared with baseline. Notably, we reduce the decoding repetition rate on the evaluation set to zero, showing that the decoding repetition problem has been solved fundamentally.

VITA: Towards Open-Source Interactive Omni Multimodal LLM

The remarkable multimodal capabilities and interactive experience of GPT-4o underscore their necessity in practical applications, yet open-source models rarely excel in both areas. In this paper, we introduce VITA, the first-ever open-source Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) adept at simultaneous processing and analysis of Video, Image, Text, and Audio modalities, and meanwhile has an advanced multimodal interactive experience. Starting from Mixtral 8x7B as a language foundation, we expand its Chinese vocabulary followed by bilingual instruction tuning. We further endow the language model with visual and audio capabilities through two-stage multi-task learning of multimodal alignment and instruction tuning. VITA demonstrates robust foundational capabilities of multilingual, vision, and audio understanding, as evidenced by its strong performance across a range of both unimodal and multimodal benchmarks. Beyond foundational capabilities, we have made considerable progress in enhancing the natural multimodal human-computer interaction experience. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to exploit non-awakening interaction and audio interrupt in MLLM. VITA is the first step for the open-source community to explore the seamless integration of multimodal understanding and interaction. While there is still lots of work to be done on VITA to get close to close-source counterparts, we hope that its role as a pioneer can serve as a cornerstone for subsequent research. Project Page: https://vita-home.github.io.

Seeing Text in the Dark: Algorithm and Benchmark

Localizing text in low-light environments is challenging due to visual degradations. Although a straightforward solution involves a two-stage pipeline with low-light image enhancement (LLE) as the initial step followed by detector, LLE is primarily designed for human vision instead of machine and can accumulate errors. In this work, we propose an efficient and effective single-stage approach for localizing text in dark that circumvents the need for LLE. We introduce a constrained learning module as an auxiliary mechanism during the training stage of the text detector. This module is designed to guide the text detector in preserving textual spatial features amidst feature map resizing, thus minimizing the loss of spatial information in texts under low-light visual degradations. Specifically, we incorporate spatial reconstruction and spatial semantic constraints within this module to ensure the text detector acquires essential positional and contextual range knowledge. Our approach enhances the original text detector's ability to identify text's local topological features using a dynamic snake feature pyramid network and adopts a bottom-up contour shaping strategy with a novel rectangular accumulation technique for accurate delineation of streamlined text features. In addition, we present a comprehensive low-light dataset for arbitrary-shaped text, encompassing diverse scenes and languages. Notably, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on this low-light dataset and exhibits comparable performance on standard normal light datasets. The code and dataset will be released.