Can Language Models Enable In-Context Database?

Large language models (LLMs) are emerging as few-shot learners capable of handling a variety of tasks, including comprehension, planning, reasoning, question answering, arithmetic calculations, and more. At the core of these capabilities is LLMs' proficiency in representing and understanding structural or semi-structural data, such as tables and graphs. Numerous studies have demonstrated that reasoning on tabular data or graphs is not only feasible for LLMs but also gives a promising research direction which treats these data as in-context data. The lightweight and human readable characteristics of in-context database can potentially make it an alternative for the traditional database in typical RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) settings. However, almost all current work focuses on static in-context data, which does not allow dynamic update. In this paper, to enable dynamic database update, delta encoding of database is proposed. We explore how data stored in traditional RDBMS can be encoded as in-context text and evaluate LLMs' proficiency for CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations on in-context databases. A benchmark named InConDB is presented and extensive experiments are conducted to show the performance of different language models in enabling in-context database by varying the database encoding method, prompting method, operation type and input data distribution, revealing both the proficiency and limitations.

CTEFM-VC: Zero-Shot Voice Conversion Based on Content-Aware Timbre Ensemble Modeling and Flow Matching

Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to transform the timbre of a source speaker into any previously unseen target speaker, while preserving the original linguistic content. Despite notable progress, attaining a degree of speaker similarity and naturalness on par with ground truth recordings continues to pose great challenge. In this paper, we propose CTEFM-VC, a zero-shot VC framework that leverages Content-aware Timbre Ensemble modeling and Flow Matching. Specifically, CTEFM-VC disentangles utterances into linguistic content and timbre representations, subsequently utilizing a conditional flow matching model and a vocoder to reconstruct the mel-spectrogram and waveform. To enhance its timbre modeling capability and the naturalness of generated speech, we propose a context-aware timbre ensemble modeling approach that adaptively integrates diverse speaker verification embeddings and enables the joint utilization of linguistic and timbre features through a cross-attention module. Experiments show that our CTEFM-VC system surpasses state-of-the-art VC methods in both speaker similarity and naturalness by at least 18.5% and 7.0%.

Building Multi-Agent Copilot towards Autonomous Agricultural Data Management and Analysis

Current agricultural data management and analysis paradigms are to large extent traditional, in which data collecting, curating, integration, loading, storing, sharing and analyzing still involve too much human effort and know-how. The experts, researchers and the farm operators need to understand the data and the whole process of data management pipeline to make fully use of the data. The essential problem of the traditional paradigm is the lack of a layer of orchestrational intelligence which can understand, organize and coordinate the data processing utilities to maximize data management and analysis outcome. The emerging reasoning and tool mastering abilities of large language models (LLM) make it a potentially good fit to this position, which helps a shift from the traditional user-driven paradigm to AI-driven paradigm. In this paper, we propose and explore the idea of a LLM based copilot for autonomous agricultural data management and analysis. Based on our previously developed platform of Agricultural Data Management and Analytics (ADMA), we build a proof-of-concept multi-agent system called ADMA Copilot, which can understand user's intent, makes plans for data processing pipeline and accomplishes tasks automatically, in which three agents: a LLM based controller, an input formatter and an output formatter collaborate together. Different from existing LLM based solutions, by defining a meta-program graph, our work decouples control flow and data flow to enhance the predictability of the behaviour of the agents. Experiments demonstrates the intelligence, autonomy, efficacy, efficiency, extensibility, flexibility and privacy of our system. Comparison is also made between ours and existing systems to show the superiority and potential of our system.

Monocular Visual Place Recognition in LiDAR Maps via Cross-Modal State Space Model and Multi-View Matching

Achieving monocular camera localization within pre-built LiDAR maps can bypass the simultaneous mapping process of visual SLAM systems, potentially reducing the computational overhead of autonomous localization. To this end, one of the key challenges is cross-modal place recognition, which involves retrieving 3D scenes (point clouds) from a LiDAR map according to online RGB images. In this paper, we introduce an efficient framework to learn descriptors for both RGB images and point clouds. It takes visual state space model (VMamba) as the backbone and employs a pixel-view-scene joint training strategy for cross-modal contrastive learning. To address the field-of-view differences, independent descriptors are generated from multiple evenly distributed viewpoints for point clouds. A visible 3D points overlap strategy is then designed to quantify the similarity between point cloud views and RGB images for multi-view supervision. Additionally, when generating descriptors from pixel-level features using NetVLAD, we compensate for the loss of geometric information, and introduce an efficient scheme for multi-view generation. Experimental results on the KITTI and KITTI-360 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our method. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Takin-VC: Zero-shot Voice Conversion via Jointly Hybrid Content and Memory-Augmented Context-Aware Timbre Modeling

Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to transform the source speaker timbre into an arbitrary unseen one without altering the original speech content.While recent advancements in zero-shot VC methods have shown remarkable progress, there still remains considerable potential for improvement in terms of improving speaker similarity and speech naturalness.In this paper, we propose Takin-VC, a novel zero-shot VC framework based on jointly hybrid content and memory-augmented context-aware timbre modeling to tackle this challenge. Specifically, an effective hybrid content encoder, guided by neural codec training, that leverages quantized features from pre-trained WavLM and HybridFormer is first presented to extract the linguistic content of the source speech. Subsequently, we introduce an advanced cross-attention-based context-aware timbre modeling approach that learns the fine-grained, semantically associated target timbre features. To further enhance both speaker similarity and real-time performance, we utilize a conditional flow matching model to reconstruct the Mel-spectrogram of the source speech. Additionally, we advocate an efficient memory-augmented module designed to generate high-quality conditional target inputs for the flow matching process, thereby improving the overall performance of the proposed system. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Takin-VC method surpasses state-of-the-art zero-shot VC systems, delivering superior performance in terms of both speech naturalness and speaker similarity.

CMR-Agent: Learning a Cross-Modal Agent for Iterative Image-to-Point Cloud Registration

Image-to-point cloud registration aims to determine the relative camera pose of an RGB image with respect to a point cloud. It plays an important role in camera localization within pre-built LiDAR maps. Despite the modality gaps, most learning-based methods establish 2D-3D point correspondences in feature space without any feedback mechanism for iterative optimization, resulting in poor accuracy and interpretability. In this paper, we propose to reformulate the registration procedure as an iterative Markov decision process, allowing for incremental adjustments to the camera pose based on each intermediate state. To achieve this, we employ reinforcement learning to develop a cross-modal registration agent (CMR-Agent), and use imitation learning to initialize its registration policy for stability and quick-start of the training. According to the cross-modal observations, we propose a 2D-3D hybrid state representation that fully exploits the fine-grained features of RGB images while reducing the useless neutral states caused by the spatial truncation of camera frustum. Additionally, the overall framework is well-designed to efficiently reuse one-shot cross-modal embeddings, avoiding repetitive and time-consuming feature extraction. Extensive experiments on the KITTI-Odometry and NuScenes datasets demonstrate that CMR-Agent achieves competitive accuracy and efficiency in registration. Once the one-shot embeddings are completed, each iteration only takes a few milliseconds.

MaFreeI2P: A Matching-Free Image-to-Point Cloud Registration Paradigm with Active Camera Pose Retrieval

Image-to-point cloud registration seeks to estimate their relative camera pose, which remains an open question due to the data modality gaps. The recent matching-based methods tend to tackle this by building 2D-3D correspondences. In this paper, we reveal the information loss inherent in these methods and propose a matching-free paradigm, named MaFreeI2P. Our key insight is to actively retrieve the camera pose in SE(3) space by contrasting the geometric features between the point cloud and the query image. To achieve this, we first sample a set of candidate camera poses and construct their cost volume using the cross-modal features. Superior to matching, cost volume can preserve more information and its feature similarity implicitly reflects the confidence level of the sampled poses. Afterwards, we employ a convolutional network to adaptively formulate a similarity assessment function, where the input cost volume is further improved by filtering and pose-based weighting. Finally, we update the camera pose based on the similarity scores, and adopt a heuristic strategy to iteratively shrink the pose sampling space for convergence. Our MaFreeI2P achieves a very competitive registration accuracy and recall on the KITTI-Odometry and Apollo-DaoxiangLake datasets.

A Vectorization Method Induced By Maximal Margin Classification For Persistent Diagrams

Persistent homology is an effective method for extracting topological information, represented as persistent diagrams, of spatial structure data. Hence it is well-suited for the study of protein structures. Attempts to incorporate Persistent homology in machine learning methods of protein function prediction have resulted in several techniques for vectorizing persistent diagrams. However, current vectorization methods are excessively artificial and cannot ensure the effective utilization of information or the rationality of the methods. To address this problem, we propose a more geometrical vectorization method of persistent diagrams based on maximal margin classification for Banach space, and additionaly propose a framework that utilizes topological data analysis to identify proteins with specific functions. We evaluated our vectorization method using a binary classification task on proteins and compared it with the statistical methods that exhibit the best performance among thirteen commonly used vectorization methods. The experimental results indicate that our approach surpasses the statistical methods in both robustness and precision.

MUSA: Multi-lingual Speaker Anonymization via Serial Disentanglement

Speaker anonymization is an effective privacy protection solution designed to conceal the speaker's identity while preserving the linguistic content and para-linguistic information of the original speech. While most prior studies focus solely on a single language, an ideal speaker anonymization system should be capable of handling multiple languages. This paper proposes MUSA, a Multi-lingual Speaker Anonymization approach that employs a serial disentanglement strategy to perform a step-by-step disentanglement from a global time-invariant representation to a temporal time-variant representation. By utilizing semantic distillation and self-supervised speaker distillation, the serial disentanglement strategy can avoid strong inductive biases and exhibit superior generalization performance across different languages. Meanwhile, we propose a straightforward anonymization strategy that employs empty embedding with zero values to simulate the speaker identity concealment process, eliminating the need for conversion to a pseudo-speaker identity and thereby reducing the complexity of speaker anonymization process. Experimental results on VoicePrivacy official datasets and multi-lingual datasets demonstrate that MUSA can effectively protect speaker privacy while preserving linguistic content and para-linguistic information.

FAGhead: Fully Animate Gaussian Head from Monocular Videos

High-fidelity reconstruction of 3D human avatars has a wild application in visual reality. In this paper, we introduce FAGhead, a method that enables fully controllable human portraits from monocular videos. We explicit the traditional 3D morphable meshes (3DMM) and optimize the neutral 3D Gaussians to reconstruct with complex expressions. Furthermore, we employ a novel Point-based Learnable Representation Field (PLRF) with learnable Gaussian point positions to enhance reconstruction performance. Meanwhile, to effectively manage the edges of avatars, we introduced the alpha rendering to supervise the alpha value of each pixel. Extensive experimental results on the open-source datasets and our capturing datasets demonstrate that our approach is able to generate high-fidelity 3D head avatars and fully control the expression and pose of the virtual avatars, which is outperforming than existing works.