Shape My Moves: Text-Driven Shape-Aware Synthesis of Human Motions

We explore how body shapes influence human motion synthesis, an aspect often overlooked in existing text-to-motion generation methods due to the ease of learning a homogenized, canonical body shape. However, this homogenization can distort the natural correlations between different body shapes and their motion dynamics. Our method addresses this gap by generating body-shape-aware human motions from natural language prompts. We utilize a finite scalar quantization-based variational autoencoder (FSQ-VAE) to quantize motion into discrete tokens and then leverage continuous body shape information to de-quantize these tokens back into continuous, detailed motion. Additionally, we harness the capabilities of a pretrained language model to predict both continuous shape parameters and motion tokens, facilitating the synthesis of text-aligned motions and decoding them into shape-aware motions. We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively, and also conduct a comprehensive perceptual study to demonstrate its efficacy in generating shape-aware motions.

StrokeFusion: Vector Sketch Generation via Joint Stroke-UDF Encoding and Latent Sequence Diffusion

In the field of sketch generation, raster-format trained models often produce non-stroke artifacts, while vector-format trained models typically lack a holistic understanding of sketches, leading to compromised recognizability. Moreover, existing methods struggle to extract common features from similar elements (e.g., eyes of animals) appearing at varying positions across sketches. To address these challenges, we propose StrokeFusion, a two-stage framework for vector sketch generation. It contains a dual-modal sketch feature learning network that maps strokes into a high-quality latent space. This network decomposes sketches into normalized strokes and jointly encodes stroke sequences with Unsigned Distance Function (UDF) maps, representing sketches as sets of stroke feature vectors. Building upon this representation, our framework exploits a stroke-level latent diffusion model that simultaneously adjusts stroke position, scale, and trajectory during generation. This enables high-fidelity sketch generation while supporting stroke interpolation editing. Extensive experiments on the QuickDraw dataset demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, validating its effectiveness in preserving structural integrity and semantic features. Code and models will be made publicly available upon publication.

Nested Stochastic Gradient Descent for (Generalized) Sinkhorn Distance-Regularized Distributionally Robust Optimization

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a powerful technique to train robust models against data distribution shift. This paper aims to solve regularized nonconvex DRO problems, where the uncertainty set is modeled by a so-called generalized Sinkhorn distance and the loss function is nonconvex and possibly unbounded. Such a distance allows to model uncertainty of distributions with different probability supports and divergence functions. For this class of regularized DRO problems, we derive a novel dual formulation taking the form of nested stochastic programming, where the dual variable depends on the data sample. To solve the dual problem, we provide theoretical evidence to design a nested stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm, which leverages stochastic approximation to estimate the nested stochastic gradients. We study the convergence rate of nested SGD and establish polynomial iteration and sample complexities that are independent of the data size and parameter dimension, indicating its potential for solving large-scale DRO problems. We conduct numerical experiments to demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed algorithm.

Video Motion Graphs

We present Video Motion Graphs, a system designed to generate realistic human motion videos. Using a reference video and conditional signals such as music or motion tags, the system synthesizes new videos by first retrieving video clips with gestures matching the conditions and then generating interpolation frames to seamlessly connect clip boundaries. The core of our approach is HMInterp, a robust Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) model that enables seamless interpolation of discontinuous frames, even for complex motion scenarios like dancing. HMInterp i) employs a dual-branch interpolation approach, combining a Motion Diffusion Model for human skeleton motion interpolation with a diffusion-based video frame interpolation model for final frame generation. ii) adopts condition progressive training to effectively leverage identity strong and weak conditions, such as images and pose. These designs ensure both high video texture quality and accurate motion trajectory. Results show that our Video Motion Graphs outperforms existing generative- and retrieval-based methods for multi-modal conditioned human motion video generation. Project page can be found at https://h-liu1997.github.io/Video-Motion-Graphs/

CASE -- Condition-Aware Sentence Embeddings for Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity Measurement

The meaning conveyed by a sentence often depends on the context in which it appears. Despite the progress of sentence embedding methods, it remains unclear how to best modify a sentence embedding conditioned on its context. To address this problem, we propose Condition-Aware Sentence Embeddings (CASE), an efficient and accurate method to create an embedding for a sentence under a given condition. First, CASE creates an embedding for the condition using a Large Language Model (LLM), where the sentence influences the attention scores computed for the tokens in the condition during pooling. Next, a supervised nonlinear projection is learned to reduce the dimensionality of the LLM-based text embeddings. We show that CASE significantly outperforms previously proposed Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity (C-STS) methods on an existing standard benchmark dataset. We find that subtracting the condition embedding consistently improves the C-STS performance of LLM-based text embeddings. Moreover, we propose a supervised dimensionality reduction method that not only reduces the dimensionality of LLM-based embeddings but also significantly improves their performance.

Universal Incremental Learning: Mitigating Confusion from Inter- and Intra-task Distribution Randomness

Incremental learning (IL) aims to overcome catastrophic forgetting of previous tasks while learning new ones. Existing IL methods make strong assumptions that the incoming task type will either only increases new classes or domains (i.e. Class IL, Domain IL), or increase by a static scale in a class- and domain-agnostic manner (i.e. Versatile IL (VIL)), which greatly limit their applicability in the unpredictable and dynamic wild. In this work, we investigate $\textbf{Universal Incremental Learning (UIL)}$, where a model neither knows which new classes or domains will increase along sequential tasks, nor the scale of the increments within each task. This uncertainty prevents the model from confidently learning knowledge from all task distributions and symmetrically focusing on the diverse knowledge within each task distribution. Consequently, UIL presents a more general and realistic IL scenario, making the model face confusion arising from inter-task and intra-task distribution randomness. To $\textbf{Mi}$tigate both $\textbf{Co}$nfusion, we propose a simple yet effective framework for UIL, named $\textbf{MiCo}$. At the inter-task distribution level, we employ a multi-objective learning scheme to enforce accurate and deterministic predictions, and its effectiveness is further enhanced by a direction recalibration module that reduces conflicting gradients. Moreover, at the intra-task distribution level, we introduce a magnitude recalibration module to alleviate asymmetrical optimization towards imbalanced class distribution. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods in both the UIL scenario and the VIL scenario. Our code will be available at $\href{https://github.com/rolsheng/UIL}{here}$.

SemEval-2025 Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection

We present our shared task on text-based emotion detection, covering more than 30 languages from seven distinct language families. These languages are predominantly low-resource and spoken across various continents. The data instances are multi-labeled into six emotional classes, with additional datasets in 11 languages annotated for emotion intensity. Participants were asked to predict labels in three tracks: (a) emotion labels in monolingual settings, (b) emotion intensity scores, and (c) emotion labels in cross-lingual settings. The task attracted over 700 participants. We received final submissions from more than 200 teams and 93 system description papers. We report baseline results, as well as findings on the best-performing systems, the most common approaches, and the most effective methods across various tracks and languages. The datasets for this task are publicly available.

FREAK: Frequency-modulated High-fidelity and Real-time Audio-driven Talking Portrait Synthesis

Achieving high-fidelity lip-speech synchronization in audio-driven talking portrait synthesis remains challenging. While multi-stage pipelines or diffusion models yield high-quality results, they suffer from high computational costs. Some approaches perform well on specific individuals with low resources, yet still exhibit mismatched lip movements. The aforementioned methods are modeled in the pixel domain. We observed that there are noticeable discrepancies in the frequency domain between the synthesized talking videos and natural videos. Currently, no research on talking portrait synthesis has considered this aspect. To address this, we propose a FREquency-modulated, high-fidelity, and real-time Audio-driven talKing portrait synthesis framework, named FREAK, which models talking portraits from the frequency domain perspective, enhancing the fidelity and naturalness of the synthesized portraits. FREAK introduces two novel frequency-based modules: 1) the Visual Encoding Frequency Modulator (VEFM) to couple multi-scale visual features in the frequency domain, better preserving visual frequency information and reducing the gap in the frequency spectrum between synthesized and natural frames. and 2) the Audio Visual Frequency Modulator (AVFM) to help the model learn the talking pattern in the frequency domain and improve audio-visual synchronization. Additionally, we optimize the model in both pixel domain and frequency domain jointly. Furthermore, FREAK supports seamless switching between one-shot and video dubbing settings, offering enhanced flexibility. Due to its superior performance, it can simultaneously support high-resolution video results and real-time inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method synthesizes high-fidelity talking portraits with detailed facial textures and precise lip synchronization in real-time, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

Evaluating the Effect of Retrieval Augmentation on Social Biases

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has gained popularity as a method for conveniently incorporating novel facts that were not seen during the pre-training stage in Large Language Model (LLM)-based Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. However, LLMs are known to encode significant levels of unfair social biases. The modulation of these biases by RAG in NLG systems is not well understood. In this paper, we systematically study the relationship between the different components of a RAG system and the social biases presented in the text generated across three languages (i.e. English, Japanese and Chinese) and four social bias types (i.e. gender, race, age and religion). Specifically, using the Bias Question Answering (BBQ) benchmark datasets, we evaluate the social biases in RAG responses from document collections with varying levels of stereotypical biases, employing multiple LLMs used as generators. We find that the biases in document collections are often amplified in the generated responses, even when the generating LLM exhibits a low-level of bias. Our findings raise concerns about the use of RAG as a technique for injecting novel facts into NLG systems and call for careful evaluation of potential social biases in RAG applications before their real-world deployment.

GneissWeb: Preparing High Quality Data for LLMs at Scale

Data quantity and quality play a vital role in determining the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). High-quality data, in particular, can significantly boost the LLM's ability to generalize on a wide range of downstream tasks. Large pre-training datasets for leading LLMs remain inaccessible to the public, whereas many open datasets are small in size (less than 5 trillion tokens), limiting their suitability for training large models. In this paper, we introduce GneissWeb, a large dataset yielding around 10 trillion tokens that caters to the data quality and quantity requirements of training LLMs. Our GneissWeb recipe that produced the dataset consists of sharded exact sub-string deduplication and a judiciously constructed ensemble of quality filters. GneissWeb achieves a favorable trade-off between data quality and quantity, producing models that outperform models trained on state-of-the-art open large datasets (5+ trillion tokens). We show that models trained using GneissWeb dataset outperform those trained on FineWeb-V1.1.0 by 2.73 percentage points in terms of average score computed on a set of 11 commonly used benchmarks (both zero-shot and few-shot) for pre-training dataset evaluation. When the evaluation set is extended to 20 benchmarks (both zero-shot and few-shot), models trained using GneissWeb still achieve a 1.75 percentage points advantage over those trained on FineWeb-V1.1.0.