Spark-TTS: An Efficient LLM-Based Text-to-Speech Model with Single-Stream Decoupled Speech Tokens

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. However, existing foundation models rely on multi-stage processing or complex architectures for predicting multiple codebooks, limiting efficiency and integration flexibility. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Spark-TTS, a novel system powered by BiCodec, a single-stream speech codec that decomposes speech into two complementary token types: low-bitrate semantic tokens for linguistic content and fixed-length global tokens for speaker attributes. This disentangled representation, combined with the Qwen2.5 LLM and a chain-of-thought (CoT) generation approach, enables both coarse-grained control (e.g., gender, speaking style) and fine-grained adjustments (e.g., precise pitch values, speaking rate). To facilitate research in controllable TTS, we introduce VoxBox, a meticulously curated 100,000-hour dataset with comprehensive attribute annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spark-TTS not only achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot voice cloning but also generates highly customizable voices that surpass the limitations of reference-based synthesis. Source code, pre-trained models, and audio samples are available at https://github.com/SparkAudio/Spark-TTS.

Narrative-Driven Travel Planning: Geoculturally-Grounded Script Generation with Evolutionary Itinerary Optimization

To enhance tourists' experiences and immersion, this paper proposes a narrative-driven travel planning framework called NarrativeGuide, which generates a geoculturally-grounded narrative script for travelers, offering a novel, role-playing experience for their journey. In the initial stage, NarrativeGuide constructs a knowledge graph for attractions within a city, then configures the worldview, character setting, and exposition based on the knowledge graph. Using this foundation, the knowledge graph is combined to generate an independent scene unit for each attraction. During the itinerary planning stage, NarrativeGuide models narrative-driven travel planning as an optimization problem, utilizing a genetic algorithm (GA) to refine the itinerary. Before evaluating the candidate itinerary, transition scripts are generated for each pair of adjacent attractions, which, along with the scene units, form a complete script. The weighted sum of script coherence, travel time, and attraction scores is then used as the fitness value to update the candidate solution set. Experimental results across four cities, i.e., Nanjing and Yangzhou in China, Paris in France, and Berlin in Germany, demonstrate significant improvements in narrative coherence and cultural fit, alongside a notable reduction in travel time and an increase in the quality of visited attractions. Our study highlights that incorporating external evolutionary optimization effectively addresses the limitations of large language models in travel planning.Our codes are available at https://github.com/Evan01225/Narrative-Driven-Travel-Planning.

Quadratic Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and Detailed Surface Reconstruction

Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has attracted attention for its superior rendering quality and speed over Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). To address 3DGS's limitations in surface representation, 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) introduced disks as scene primitives to model and reconstruct geometries from multi-view images, offering view-consistent geometry. However, the disk's first-order linear approximation often leads to over-smoothed results. We propose Quadratic Gaussian Splatting (QGS), a novel method that replaces disks with quadric surfaces, enhancing geometric fitting, whose code will be open-sourced. QGS defines Gaussian distributions in non-Euclidean space, allowing primitives to capture more complex textures. As a second-order surface approximation, QGS also renders spatial curvature to guide the normal consistency term, to effectively reduce over-smoothing. Moreover, QGS is a generalized version of 2DGS that achieves more accurate and detailed reconstructions, as verified by experiments on DTU and TNT, demonstrating its effectiveness in surpassing current state-of-the-art methods in geometry reconstruction. Our code willbe released as open source.

The NPU-HWC System for the ISCSLP 2024 Inspirational and Convincing Audio Generation Challenge

This paper presents the NPU-HWC system submitted to the ISCSLP 2024 Inspirational and Convincing Audio Generation Challenge 2024 (ICAGC). Our system consists of two modules: a speech generator for Track 1 and a background audio generator for Track 2. In Track 1, we employ Single-Codec to tokenize the speech into discrete tokens and use a language-model-based approach to achieve zero-shot speaking style cloning. The Single-Codec effectively decouples timbre and speaking style at the token level, reducing the acoustic modeling burden on the autoregressive language model. Additionally, we use DSPGAN to upsample 16 kHz mel-spectrograms to high-fidelity 48 kHz waveforms. In Track 2, we propose a background audio generator based on large language models (LLMs). This system produces scene-appropriate accompaniment descriptions, synthesizes background audio with Tango 2, and integrates it with the speech generated by our Track 1 system. Our submission achieves the second place and the first place in Track 1 and Track 2 respectively.

Prepared for the Worst: A Learning-Based Adversarial Attack for Resilience Analysis of the ICP Algorithm

This paper presents a novel method to assess the resilience of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm via deep-learning-based attacks on lidar point clouds. For safety-critical applications such as autonomous navigation, ensuring the resilience of algorithms prior to deployments is of utmost importance. The ICP algorithm has become the standard for lidar-based localization. However, the pose estimate it produces can be greatly affected by corruption in the measurements. Corruption can arise from a variety of scenarios such as occlusions, adverse weather, or mechanical issues in the sensor. Unfortunately, the complex and iterative nature of ICP makes assessing its resilience to corruption challenging. While there have been efforts to create challenging datasets and develop simulations to evaluate the resilience of ICP empirically, our method focuses on finding the maximum possible ICP pose error using perturbation-based adversarial attacks. The proposed attack induces significant pose errors on ICP and outperforms baselines more than 88% of the time across a wide range of scenarios. As an example application, we demonstrate that our attack can be used to identify areas on a map where ICP is particularly vulnerable to corruption in the measurements.

SST-ReversibleNet: Reversible-prior-based Spectral-Spatial Transformer for Efficient Hyperspectral Image Reconstruction

Spectral image reconstruction is an important task in snapshot compressed imaging. This paper aims to propose a new end-to-end framework with iterative capabilities similar to a deep unfolding network to improve reconstruction accuracy, independent of optimization conditions, and to reduce the number of parameters. A novel framework called the reversible-prior-based method is proposed. Inspired by the reversibility of the optical path, the reversible-prior-based framework projects the reconstructions back into the measurement space, and then the residuals between the projected data and the real measurements are fed into the network for iteration. The reconstruction subnet in the network then learns the mapping of the residuals to the true values to improve reconstruction accuracy. In addition, a novel spectral-spatial transformer is proposed to account for the global correlation of spectral data in both spatial and spectral dimensions while balancing network depth and computational complexity, in response to the shortcomings of existing transformer-based denoising modules that ignore spatial texture features or learn local spatial features at the expense of global spatial features. Extensive experiments show that our SST-ReversibleNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on simulated and real HSI datasets, while requiring lower computational and storage costs. https://github.com/caizeyu1992/SST

Efficient Single-Image Depth Estimation on Mobile Devices, Mobile AI & AIM 2022 Challenge: Report

Various depth estimation models are now widely used on many mobile and IoT devices for image segmentation, bokeh effect rendering, object tracking and many other mobile tasks. Thus, it is very crucial to have efficient and accurate depth estimation models that can run fast on low-power mobile chipsets. In this Mobile AI challenge, the target was to develop deep learning-based single image depth estimation solutions that can show a real-time performance on IoT platforms and smartphones. For this, the participants used a large-scale RGB-to-depth dataset that was collected with the ZED stereo camera capable to generated depth maps for objects located at up to 50 meters. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Raspberry Pi 4 platform, where the developed solutions were able to generate VGA resolution depth maps at up to 27 FPS while achieving high fidelity results. All models developed in the challenge are also compatible with any Android or Linux-based mobile devices, their detailed description is provided in this paper.

Low Rank Approximation for General Tensor Networks

We study the problem of approximating a given tensor with $q$ modes $A \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times \ldots \times n}$ with an arbitrary tensor network of rank $k$ -- that is, a graph $G = (V, E)$, where $|V| = q$, together with a collection of tensors $\{U_v \mid v \in V\}$ which are contracted in the manner specified by $G$ to obtain a tensor $T$. For each mode of $U_v$ corresponding to an edge incident to $v$, the dimension is $k$, and we wish to find $U_v$ such that the Frobenius norm distance between $T$ and $A$ is minimized. This generalizes a number of well-known tensor network decompositions, such as the Tensor Train, Tensor Ring, Tucker, and PEPS decompositions. We approximate $A$ by a binary tree network $T'$ with $O(q)$ cores, such that the dimension on each edge of this network is at most $\widetilde{O}(k^{O(dt)} \cdot q/\varepsilon)$, where $d$ is the maximum degree of $G$ and $t$ is its treewidth, such that $\|A - T'\|_F^2 \leq (1 + \varepsilon) \|A - T\|_F^2$. The running time of our algorithm is $O(q \cdot \text{nnz}(A)) + n \cdot \text{poly}(k^{dt}q/\varepsilon)$, where $\text{nnz}(A)$ is the number of nonzero entries of $A$. Our algorithm is based on a new dimensionality reduction technique for tensor decomposition which may be of independent interest. We also develop fixed-parameter tractable $(1 + \varepsilon)$-approximation algorithms for Tensor Train and Tucker decompositions, improving the running time of Song, Woodruff and Zhong (SODA, 2019) and avoiding the use of generic polynomial system solvers. We show that our algorithms have a nearly optimal dependence on $1/\varepsilon$ assuming that there is no $O(1)$-approximation algorithm for the $2 \to 4$ norm with better running time than brute force. Finally, we give additional results for Tucker decomposition with robust loss functions, and fixed-parameter tractable CP decomposition.

Using Deep Learning Sequence Models to Identify SARS-CoV-2 Divergence

SARS-CoV-2 is an upper respiratory system RNA virus that has caused over 3 million deaths and infecting over 150 million worldwide as of May 2021. With thousands of strains sequenced to date, SARS-CoV-2 mutations pose significant challenges to scientists on keeping pace with vaccine development and public health measures. Therefore, an efficient method of identifying the divergence of lab samples from patients would greatly aid the documentation of SARS-CoV-2 genomics. In this study, we propose a neural network model that leverages recurrent and convolutional units to directly take in amino acid sequences of spike proteins and classify corresponding clades. We also compared our model's performance with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) pre-trained on protein database. Our approach has the potential of providing a more computationally efficient alternative to current homology based intra-species differentiation.

Fast and Accurate Single-Image Depth Estimation on Mobile Devices, Mobile AI 2021 Challenge: Report

Depth estimation is an important computer vision problem with many practical applications to mobile devices. While many solutions have been proposed for this task, they are usually very computationally expensive and thus are not applicable for on-device inference. To address this problem, we introduce the first Mobile AI challenge, where the target is to develop an end-to-end deep learning-based depth estimation solutions that can demonstrate a nearly real-time performance on smartphones and IoT platforms. For this, the participants were provided with a new large-scale dataset containing RGB-depth image pairs obtained with a dedicated stereo ZED camera producing high-resolution depth maps for objects located at up to 50 meters. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the popular Raspberry Pi 4 platform with a mobile ARM-based Broadcom chipset. The proposed solutions can generate VGA resolution depth maps at up to 10 FPS on the Raspberry Pi 4 while achieving high fidelity results, and are compatible with any Android or Linux-based mobile devices. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.