ViRefSAM: Visual Reference-Guided Segment Anything Model for Remote Sensing Segmentation

The Segment Anything Model (SAM), with its prompt-driven paradigm, exhibits strong generalization in generic segmentation tasks. However, applying SAM to remote sensing (RS) images still faces two major challenges. First, manually constructing precise prompts for each image (e.g., points or boxes) is labor-intensive and inefficient, especially in RS scenarios with dense small objects or spatially fragmented distributions. Second, SAM lacks domain adaptability, as it is pre-trained primarily on natural images and struggles to capture RS-specific semantics and spatial characteristics, especially when segmenting novel or unseen classes. To address these issues, inspired by few-shot learning, we propose ViRefSAM, a novel framework that guides SAM utilizing only a few annotated reference images that contain class-specific objects. Without requiring manual prompts, ViRefSAM enables automatic segmentation of class-consistent objects across RS images. Specifically, ViRefSAM introduces two key components while keeping SAM's original architecture intact: (1) a Visual Contextual Prompt Encoder that extracts class-specific semantic clues from reference images and generates object-aware prompts via contextual interaction with target images; and (2) a Dynamic Target Alignment Adapter, integrated into SAM's image encoder, which mitigates the domain gap by injecting class-specific semantics into target image features, enabling SAM to dynamically focus on task-relevant regions. Extensive experiments on three few-shot segmentation benchmarks, including iSAID-5$^i$, LoveDA-2$^i$, and COCO-20$^i$, demonstrate that ViRefSAM enables accurate and automatic segmentation of unseen classes by leveraging only a few reference images and consistently outperforms existing few-shot segmentation methods across diverse datasets.

MGFF-TDNN: A Multi-Granularity Feature Fusion TDNN Model with Depth-Wise Separable Module for Speaker Verification

In speaker verification, traditional models often emphasize modeling long-term contextual features to capture global speaker characteristics. However, this approach can neglect fine-grained voiceprint information, which contains highly discriminative features essential for robust speaker embeddings. This paper introduces a novel model architecture, termed MGFF-TDNN, based on multi-granularity feature fusion. The MGFF-TDNN leverages a two-dimensional depth-wise separable convolution module, enhanced with local feature modeling, as a front-end feature extractor to effectively capture time-frequency domain features. To achieve comprehensive multi-granularity feature fusion, we propose the M-TDNN structure, which integrates global contextual modeling with fine-grained feature extraction by combining time-delay neural networks and phoneme-level feature pooling. Experiments on the VoxCeleb dataset demonstrate that the MGFF-TDNN achieves outstanding performance in speaker verification while remaining efficient in terms of parameters and computational resources.

Psy-Insight: Explainable Multi-turn Bilingual Dataset for Mental Health Counseling

The in-context learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) show great potential in mental health support. However, the lack of counseling datasets, particularly in Chinese corpora, restricts their application in this field. To address this, we constructed Psy-Insight, the first mental health-oriented explainable multi-task bilingual dataset. We collected face-to-face multi-turn counseling dialogues, which are annotated with multi-task labels and conversation process explanations. Our annotations include psychotherapy, emotion, strategy, and topic labels, as well as turn-level reasoning and session-level guidance. Psy-Insight is not only suitable for tasks such as label recognition but also meets the need for training LLMs to act as empathetic counselors through logical reasoning. Experiments show that training LLMs on Psy-Insight enables the models to not only mimic the conversation style but also understand the underlying strategies and reasoning of counseling.

Psy-Copilot: Visual Chain of Thought for Counseling

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in the field of psychological counseling. However, when human therapists work with LLMs in therapy sessions, it is hard to understand how the model gives the answers. To address this, we have constructed Psy-COT, a graph designed to visualize the thought processes of LLMs during therapy sessions. The Psy-COT graph presents semi-structured counseling conversations alongside step-by-step annotations that capture the reasoning and insights of therapists. Moreover, we have developed Psy-Copilot, which is a conversational AI assistant designed to assist human psychological therapists in their consultations. It can offer traceable psycho-information based on retrieval, including response candidates, similar dialogue sessions, related strategies, and visual traces of results. We have also built an interactive platform for AI-assisted counseling. It has an interface that displays the relevant parts of the retrieval sub-graph. The Psy-Copilot is designed not to replace psychotherapists but to foster collaboration between AI and human therapists, thereby promoting mental health development. Our code and demo are both open-sourced and available for use.

Mel-Refine: A Plug-and-Play Approach to Refine Mel-Spectrogram in Audio Generation

Text-to-audio (TTA) model is capable of generating diverse audio from textual prompts. However, most mainstream TTA models, which predominantly rely on Mel-spectrograms, still face challenges in producing audio with rich content. The intricate details and texture required in Mel-spectrograms for such audio often surpass the models' capacity, leading to outputs that are blurred or lack coherence. In this paper, we begin by investigating the critical role of U-Net in Mel-spectrogram generation. Our analysis shows that in U-Net structure, high-frequency components in skip-connections and the backbone influence texture and detail, while low-frequency components in the backbone are critical for the diffusion denoising process. We further propose ``Mel-Refine'', a plug-and-play approach that enhances Mel-spectrogram texture and detail by adjusting different component weights during inference. Our method requires no additional training or fine-tuning and is fully compatible with any diffusion-based TTA architecture. Experimental results show that our approach boosts performance metrics of the latest TTA model Tango2 by 25\%, demonstrating its effectiveness.

Enhancing Modal Fusion by Alignment and Label Matching for Multimodal Emotion Recognition

To address the limitation in multimodal emotion recognition (MER) performance arising from inter-modal information fusion, we propose a novel MER framework based on multitask learning where fusion occurs after alignment, called Foal-Net. The framework is designed to enhance the effectiveness of modality fusion and includes two auxiliary tasks: audio-video emotion alignment (AVEL) and cross-modal emotion label matching (MEM). First, AVEL achieves alignment of emotional information in audio-video representations through contrastive learning. Then, a modal fusion network integrates the aligned features. Meanwhile, MEM assesses whether the emotions of the current sample pair are the same, providing assistance for modal information fusion and guiding the model to focus more on emotional information. The experimental results conducted on IEMOCAP corpus show that Foal-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and emotion alignment is necessary before modal fusion.

SPA-SVC: Self-supervised Pitch Augmentation for Singing Voice Conversion

Diffusion-based singing voice conversion (SVC) models have shown better synthesis quality compared to traditional methods. However, in cross-domain SVC scenarios, where there is a significant disparity in pitch between the source and target voice domains, the models tend to generate audios with hoarseness, posing challenges in achieving high-quality vocal outputs. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Self-supervised Pitch Augmentation method for Singing Voice Conversion (SPA-SVC), which can enhance the voice quality in SVC tasks without requiring additional data or increasing model parameters. We innovatively introduce a cycle pitch shifting training strategy and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) loss into our SVC model, effectively enhancing its performance. Experimental results on the public singing datasets M4Singer indicate that our proposed method significantly improves model performance in both general SVC scenarios and particularly in cross-domain SVC scenarios.

Improving Audio Codec-based Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Multi-Modal Context and Large Language Model

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and development of audio codecs greatly propel the zero-shot TTS. They can synthesize personalized speech with only a 3-second speech of an unseen speaker as acoustic prompt. However, they only support short speech prompts and cannot leverage longer context information, as required in audiobook and conversational TTS scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel audio codec-based TTS model to adapt context features with multiple enhancements. Inspired by the success of Qformer, we propose a multi-modal context-enhanced Qformer (MMCE-Qformer) to utilize additional multi-modal context information. Besides, we adapt a pretrained LLM to leverage its understanding ability to predict semantic tokens, and use a SoundStorm to generate acoustic tokens thereby enhancing audio quality and speaker similarity. The extensive objective and subjective evaluations show that our proposed method outperforms baselines across various context TTS scenarios.

Retrieval Augmented Generation in Prompt-based Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Context-Aware Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining

Recent prompt-based text-to-speech (TTS) models can clone an unseen speaker using only a short speech prompt. They leverage a strong in-context ability to mimic the speech prompts, including speaker style, prosody, and emotion. Therefore, the selection of a speech prompt greatly influences the generated speech, akin to the importance of a prompt in large language models (LLMs). However, current prompt-based TTS models choose the speech prompt manually or simply at random. Hence, in this paper, we adapt retrieval augmented generation (RAG) from LLMs to prompt-based TTS. Unlike traditional RAG methods, we additionally consider contextual information during the retrieval process and present a Context-Aware Contrastive Language-Audio Pre-training (CA-CLAP) model to extract context-aware, style-related features. The objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that our proposed RAG method outperforms baselines, and our CA-CLAP achieves better results than text-only retrieval methods.

CRB Minimization for RIS-aided mmWave Integrated Sensing and Communications

In this paper, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is employed in a millimeter wave (mmWave) integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system. To alleviate the multi-hop attenuation, the semi-self sensing RIS approach is adopted, wherein sensors are configured at the RIS to receive the radar echo signal. Focusing on the estimation accuracy, the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for estimating the direction-of-the-angles is derived as the metric for sensing performance. A joint optimization problem on hybrid beamforming and RIS phaseshifts is proposed to minimize the CRB, while maintaining satisfactory communication performance evaluated by the achievable data rate. The CRB minimization problem is first transformed as a more tractable form based on Fisher information matrix (FIM). To solve the complex non-convex problem, a double layer loop algorithm is proposed based on penalty concave-convex procedure (penalty-CCCP) and block coordinate descent (BCD) method with two sub-problems. Successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithm and second order cone (SOC) constraints are employed to tackle the non-convexity in the hybrid beamforming optimization. To optimize the unit modulus constrained analog beamforming and phase shifts, manifold optimization (MO) is adopted. Finally, the numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed CRB minimization algorithm, and show the performance improvement compared with other baselines. Additionally, the proposed hybrid beamforming algorithm can achieve approximately 96% of the sensing performance exhibited by the full digital approach within only a limited number of radio frequency (RF) chains.