Step-Audio: Unified Understanding and Generation in Intelligent Speech Interaction

Real-time speech interaction, serving as a fundamental interface for human-machine collaboration, holds immense potential. However, current open-source models face limitations such as high costs in voice data collection, weakness in dynamic control, and limited intelligence. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Step-Audio, the first production-ready open-source solution. Key contributions include: 1) a 130B-parameter unified speech-text multi-modal model that achieves unified understanding and generation, with the Step-Audio-Chat version open-sourced; 2) a generative speech data engine that establishes an affordable voice cloning framework and produces the open-sourced lightweight Step-Audio-TTS-3B model through distillation; 3) an instruction-driven fine control system enabling dynamic adjustments across dialects, emotions, singing, and RAP; 4) an enhanced cognitive architecture augmented with tool calling and role-playing abilities to manage complex tasks effectively. Based on our new StepEval-Audio-360 evaluation benchmark, Step-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance in human evaluations, especially in terms of instruction following. On open-source benchmarks like LLaMA Question, shows 9.3% average performance improvement, demonstrating our commitment to advancing the development of open-source multi-modal language technologies. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio.

Semantic Equitable Clustering: A Simple, Fast and Effective Strategy for Vision Transformer

The Vision Transformer (ViT) has gained prominence for its superior relational modeling prowess. However, its global attention mechanism's quadratic complexity poses substantial computational burdens. A common remedy spatially groups tokens for self-attention, reducing computational requirements. Nonetheless, this strategy neglects semantic information in tokens, possibly scattering semantically-linked tokens across distinct groups, thus compromising the efficacy of self-attention intended for modeling inter-token dependencies. Motivated by these insights, we introduce a fast and balanced clustering method, named \textbf{S}emantic \textbf{E}quitable \textbf{C}lustering (SEC). SEC clusters tokens based on their global semantic relevance in an efficient, straightforward manner. In contrast to traditional clustering methods requiring multiple iterations, our method achieves token clustering in a single pass. Additionally, SEC regulates the number of tokens per cluster, ensuring a balanced distribution for effective parallel processing on current computational platforms without necessitating further optimization. Capitalizing on SEC, we propose a versatile vision backbone, SecViT. Comprehensive experiments in image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation validate to the effectiveness of SecViT. Remarkably, SecViT attains an impressive \textbf{84.2\%} image classification accuracy with only \textbf{27M} parameters and \textbf{4.4G} FLOPs, without the need for for additional supervision or data. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/qhfan/SecViT}.

Vision Transformer with Sparse Scan Prior

In recent years, Transformers have achieved remarkable progress in computer vision tasks. However, their global modeling often comes with substantial computational overhead, in stark contrast to the human eye's efficient information processing. Inspired by the human eye's sparse scanning mechanism, we propose a \textbf{S}parse \textbf{S}can \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{A}ttention mechanism ($\rm{S}^3\rm{A}$). This mechanism predefines a series of Anchors of Interest for each token and employs local attention to efficiently model the spatial information around these anchors, avoiding redundant global modeling and excessive focus on local information. This approach mirrors the human eye's functionality and significantly reduces the computational load of vision models. Building on $\rm{S}^3\rm{A}$, we introduce the \textbf{S}parse \textbf{S}can \textbf{Vi}sion \textbf{T}ransformer (SSViT). Extensive experiments demonstrate the outstanding performance of SSViT across a variety of tasks. Specifically, on ImageNet classification, without additional supervision or training data, SSViT achieves top-1 accuracies of \textbf{84.4\%/85.7\%} with \textbf{4.4G/18.2G} FLOPs. SSViT also excels in downstream tasks such as object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Its robustness is further validated across diverse datasets. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/qhfan/SSViT}.

RMT: Retentive Networks Meet Vision Transformers

Transformer first appears in the field of natural language processing and is later migrated to the computer vision domain, where it demonstrates excellent performance in vision tasks. However, recently, Retentive Network (RetNet) has emerged as an architecture with the potential to replace Transformer, attracting widespread attention in the NLP community. Therefore, we raise the question of whether transferring RetNet's idea to vision can also bring outstanding performance to vision tasks. To address this, we combine RetNet and Transformer to propose RMT. Inspired by RetNet, RMT introduces explicit decay into the vision backbone, bringing prior knowledge related to spatial distances to the vision model. This distance-related spatial prior allows for explicit control of the range of tokens that each token can attend to. Additionally, to reduce the computational cost of global modeling, we decompose this modeling process along the two coordinate axes of the image. Abundant experiments have demonstrated that our RMT exhibits exceptional performance across various computer vision tasks. For example, RMT achieves 84.1% Top1-acc on ImageNet-1k using merely 4.5G FLOPs. To the best of our knowledge, among all models, RMT achieves the highest Top1-acc when models are of similar size and trained with the same strategy. Moreover, RMT significantly outperforms existing vision backbones in downstream tasks such as object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Our work is still in progress.

Occ$^2$Net: Robust Image Matching Based on 3D Occupancy Estimation for Occluded Regions

Image matching is a fundamental and critical task in various visual applications, such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and image retrieval, which require accurate pose estimation. However, most existing methods ignore the occlusion relations between objects caused by camera motion and scene structure. In this paper, we propose Occ$^2$Net, a novel image matching method that models occlusion relations using 3D occupancy and infers matching points in occluded regions. Thanks to the inductive bias encoded in the Occupancy Estimation (OE) module, it greatly simplifies bootstrapping of a multi-view consistent 3D representation that can then integrate information from multiple views. Together with an Occlusion-Aware (OA) module, it incorporates attention layers and rotation alignment to enable matching between occluded and visible points. We evaluate our method on both real-world and simulated datasets and demonstrate its superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on several metrics, especially in occlusion scenarios.

ICDAR 2023 Competition on Structured Text Extraction from Visually-Rich Document Images

Structured text extraction is one of the most valuable and challenging application directions in the field of Document AI. However, the scenarios of past benchmarks are limited, and the corresponding evaluation protocols usually focus on the submodules of the structured text extraction scheme. In order to eliminate these problems, we organized the ICDAR 2023 competition on Structured text extraction from Visually-Rich Document images (SVRD). We set up two tracks for SVRD including Track 1: HUST-CELL and Track 2: Baidu-FEST, where HUST-CELL aims to evaluate the end-to-end performance of Complex Entity Linking and Labeling, and Baidu-FEST focuses on evaluating the performance and generalization of Zero-shot / Few-shot Structured Text extraction from an end-to-end perspective. Compared to the current document benchmarks, our two tracks of competition benchmark enriches the scenarios greatly and contains more than 50 types of visually-rich document images (mainly from the actual enterprise applications). The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 24th March, 2023. There are 35 participants and 91 valid submissions received for Track 1, and 15 participants and 26 valid submissions received for Track 2. In this report we will presents the motivation, competition datasets, task definition, evaluation protocol, and submission summaries. According to the performance of the submissions, we believe there is still a large gap on the expected information extraction performance for complex and zero-shot scenarios. It is hoped that this competition will attract many researchers in the field of CV and NLP, and bring some new thoughts to the field of Document AI.

On the Hidden Mystery of OCR in Large Multimodal Models

Large models have recently played a dominant role in natural language processing and multimodal vision-language learning. It remains less explored about their efficacy in text-related visual tasks. We conducted a comprehensive study of existing publicly available multimodal models, evaluating their performance in text recognition, text-based visual question answering, and key information extraction. Our findings reveal strengths and weaknesses in these models, which primarily rely on semantic understanding for word recognition and exhibit inferior perception of individual character shapes. They also display indifference towards text length and have limited capabilities in detecting fine-grained features in images. Consequently, these results demonstrate that even the current most powerful large multimodal models cannot match domain-specific methods in traditional text tasks and face greater challenges in more complex tasks. Most importantly, the baseline results showcased in this study could provide a foundational framework for the conception and assessment of innovative strategies targeted at enhancing zero-shot multimodal techniques. Evaluation pipeline will be available at https://github.com/Yuliang-Liu/MultimodalOCR.

ICDAR 2023 Competition on Reading the Seal Title

Reading seal title text is a challenging task due to the variable shapes of seals, curved text, background noise, and overlapped text. However, this important element is commonly found in official and financial scenarios, and has not received the attention it deserves in the field of OCR technology. To promote research in this area, we organized ICDAR 2023 competition on reading the seal title (ReST), which included two tasks: seal title text detection (Task 1) and end-to-end seal title recognition (Task 2). We constructed a dataset of 10,000 real seal data, covering the most common classes of seals, and labeled all seal title texts with text polygons and text contents. The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 20th March, 2023. The competition attracted 53 participants from academia and industry including 28 submissions for Task 1 and 25 submissions for Task 2, which demonstrated significant interest in this challenging task. In this report, we present an overview of the competition, including the organization, challenges, and results. We describe the dataset and tasks, and summarize the submissions and evaluation results. The results show that significant progress has been made in the field of seal title text reading, and we hope that this competition will inspire further research and development in this important area of OCR technology.

OccDepth: A Depth-Aware Method for 3D Semantic Scene Completion

3D Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) can provide dense geometric and semantic scene representations, which can be applied in the field of autonomous driving and robotic systems. It is challenging to estimate the complete geometry and semantics of a scene solely from visual images, and accurate depth information is crucial for restoring 3D geometry. In this paper, we propose the first stereo SSC method named OccDepth, which fully exploits implicit depth information from stereo images (or RGBD images) to help the recovery of 3D geometric structures. The Stereo Soft Feature Assignment (Stereo-SFA) module is proposed to better fuse 3D depth-aware features by implicitly learning the correlation between stereo images. In particular, when the input are RGBD image, a virtual stereo images can be generated through original RGB image and depth map. Besides, the Occupancy Aware Depth (OAD) module is used to obtain geometry-aware 3D features by knowledge distillation using pre-trained depth models. In addition, a reformed TartanAir benchmark, named SemanticTartanAir, is provided in this paper for further testing our OccDepth method on SSC task. Compared with the state-of-the-art RGB-inferred SSC method, extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI show that our OccDepth method achieves superior performance with improving +4.82% mIoU, of which +2.49% mIoU comes from stereo images and +2.33% mIoU comes from our proposed depth-aware method. Our code and trained models are available at https://github.com/megvii-research/OccDepth.

Ternary and Binary Quantization for Improved Classification

Dimension reduction and data quantization are two important methods for reducing data complexity. In the paper, we study the methodology of first reducing data dimension by random projection and then quantizing the projections to ternary or binary codes, which has been widely applied in classification. Usually, the quantization will seriously degrade the accuracy of classification due to high quantization errors. Interestingly, however, we observe that the quantization could provide comparable and often superior accuracy, as the data to be quantized are sparse features generated with common filters. Furthermore, this quantization property could be maintained in the random projections of sparse features, if both the features and random projection matrices are sufficiently sparse. By conducting extensive experiments, we validate and analyze this intriguing property.