XMusic: Towards a Generalized and Controllable Symbolic Music Generation Framework

In recent years, remarkable advancements in artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) have been achieved in the fields of image synthesis and text generation, generating content comparable to that produced by humans. However, the quality of AI-generated music has not yet reached this standard, primarily due to the challenge of effectively controlling musical emotions and ensuring high-quality outputs. This paper presents a generalized symbolic music generation framework, XMusic, which supports flexible prompts (i.e., images, videos, texts, tags, and humming) to generate emotionally controllable and high-quality symbolic music. XMusic consists of two core components, XProjector and XComposer. XProjector parses the prompts of various modalities into symbolic music elements (i.e., emotions, genres, rhythms and notes) within the projection space to generate matching music. XComposer contains a Generator and a Selector. The Generator generates emotionally controllable and melodious music based on our innovative symbolic music representation, whereas the Selector identifies high-quality symbolic music by constructing a multi-task learning scheme involving quality assessment, emotion recognition, and genre recognition tasks. In addition, we build XMIDI, a large-scale symbolic music dataset that contains 108,023 MIDI files annotated with precise emotion and genre labels. Objective and subjective evaluations show that XMusic significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods with impressive music quality. Our XMusic has been awarded as one of the nine Highlights of Collectibles at WAIC 2023. The project homepage of XMusic is https://xmusic-project.github.io.

MC-VTON: Minimal Control Virtual Try-On Diffusion Transformer

Virtual try-on methods based on diffusion models achieve realistic try-on effects. They use an extra reference network or an additional image encoder to process multiple conditional image inputs, which results in high training costs. Besides, they require more than 25 inference steps, bringing a long inference time. In this work, with the development of diffusion transformer (DiT), we rethink the necessity of reference network or image encoder, then propose MC-VTON, enabling DiT to integrate minimal conditional try-on inputs by utilizing its intrinsic backbone. Compared to existing methods, the superiority of MC-VTON is demonstrated in four aspects: (1)Superior detail fidelity. Our DiT-based MC-VTON exhibits superior fidelity in preserving fine-grained details. (2)Simplified network and inputs. We remove any extra reference network or image encoder. We also remove unnecessary conditions like the long prompt, pose estimation, human parsing, and depth map. We require only the masked person image and the garment image. (3)Parameter-efficient training. To process the try-on task, we fine-tune the FLUX.1-dev with only 39.7M additional parameters 0.33% of the backbone parameters). (4)Less inference steps. We apply distillation diffusion on MC-VTON and only need 8 steps to generate a realistic try-on image, with only 86.8M additional parameters (0.72% of the backbone parameters). Experiments show that MC-VTON achieves superior qualitative and quantitative results with fewer condition inputs, fewer inference steps, and fewer trainable parameters than baseline methods.

Building a Mind Palace: Structuring Environment-Grounded Semantic Graphs for Effective Long Video Analysis with LLMs

Long-form video understanding with Large Vision Language Models is challenged by the need to analyze temporally dispersed yet spatially concentrated key moments within limited context windows. In this work, we introduce VideoMindPalace, a new framework inspired by the "Mind Palace", which organizes critical video moments into a topologically structured semantic graph. VideoMindPalace organizes key information through (i) hand-object tracking and interaction, (ii) clustered activity zones representing specific areas of recurring activities, and (iii) environment layout mapping, allowing natural language parsing by LLMs to provide grounded insights on spatio-temporal and 3D context. In addition, we propose the Video MindPalace Benchmark (VMB), to assess human-like reasoning, including spatial localization, temporal reasoning, and layout-aware sequential understanding. Evaluated on VMB and established video QA datasets, including EgoSchema, NExT-QA, IntentQA, and the Active Memories Benchmark, VideoMindPalace demonstrates notable gains in spatio-temporal coherence and human-aligned reasoning, advancing long-form video analysis capabilities in VLMs.

LLM+AL: Bridging Large Language Models and Action Languages for Complex Reasoning about Actions

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in various intelligent tasks but still struggle with complex action reasoning tasks that require systematic search. To address this limitation, we propose a method that bridges the natural language understanding capabilities of LLMs with the symbolic reasoning strengths of action languages. Our approach, termed "LLM+AL," leverages the LLM's strengths in semantic parsing and commonsense knowledge generation alongside the action language's proficiency in automated reasoning based on encoded knowledge. We compare LLM+AL against state-of-the-art LLMs, including ChatGPT-4, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini Ultra 1.0, and o1-preview, using benchmarks for complex reasoning about actions. Our findings indicate that, although all methods exhibit errors, LLM+AL, with relatively minimal human corrections, consistently leads to correct answers, whereas standalone LLMs fail to improve even with human feedback. LLM+AL also contributes to automated generation of action languages.

OCRBench v2: An Improved Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models on Visual Text Localization and Reasoning

Scoring the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has witnessed growing interest recently. Existing benchmarks have highlighted the impressive performance of LMMs in text recognition; however, their abilities on certain challenging tasks, such as text localization, handwritten content extraction, and logical reasoning, remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce OCRBench v2, a large-scale bilingual text-centric benchmark with currently the most comprehensive set of tasks (4x more tasks than the previous multi-scene benchmark OCRBench), the widest coverage of scenarios (31 diverse scenarios including street scene, receipt, formula, diagram, and so on), and thorough evaluation metrics, with a total of 10,000 human-verified question-answering pairs and a high proportion of difficult samples. After carefully benchmarking state-of-the-art LMMs on OCRBench v2, we find that 20 out of 22 LMMs score below 50 (100 in total) and suffer from five-type limitations, including less frequently encountered text recognition, fine-grained perception, layout perception, complex element parsing, and logical reasoning. The benchmark and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/Yuliang-liu/MultimodalOCR.

Bridging Context Gaps: Enhancing Comprehension in Long-Form Social Conversations Through Contextualized Excerpts

We focus on enhancing comprehension in small-group recorded conversations, which serve as a medium to bring people together and provide a space for sharing personal stories and experiences on crucial social matters. One way to parse and convey information from these conversations is by sharing highlighted excerpts in subsequent conversations. This can help promote a collective understanding of relevant issues, by highlighting perspectives and experiences to other groups of people who might otherwise be unfamiliar with and thus unable to relate to these experiences. The primary challenge that arises then is that excerpts taken from one conversation and shared in another setting might be missing crucial context or key elements that were previously introduced in the original conversation. This problem is exacerbated when conversations become lengthier and richer in themes and shared experiences. To address this, we explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) can enrich these excerpts by providing socially relevant context. We present approaches for effective contextualization to improve comprehension, readability, and empathy. We show significant improvements in understanding, as assessed through subjective and objective evaluations. While LLMs can offer valuable context, they struggle with capturing key social aspects. We release the Human-annotated Salient Excerpts (HSE) dataset to support future work. Additionally, we show how context-enriched excerpts can provide more focused and comprehensive conversation summaries.

Exploring More from Multiple Gait Modalities for Human Identification

The gait, as a kind of soft biometric characteristic, can reflect the distinct walking patterns of individuals at a distance, exhibiting a promising technique for unrestrained human identification. With largely excluding gait-unrelated cues hidden in RGB videos, the silhouette and skeleton, though visually compact, have acted as two of the most prevailing gait modalities for a long time. Recently, several attempts have been made to introduce more informative data forms like human parsing and optical flow images to capture gait characteristics, along with multi-branch architectures. However, due to the inconsistency within model designs and experiment settings, we argue that a comprehensive and fair comparative study among these popular gait modalities, involving the representational capacity and fusion strategy exploration, is still lacking. From the perspectives of fine vs. coarse-grained shape and whole vs. pixel-wise motion modeling, this work presents an in-depth investigation of three popular gait representations, i.e., silhouette, human parsing, and optical flow, with various fusion evaluations, and experimentally exposes their similarities and differences. Based on the obtained insights, we further develop a C$^2$Fusion strategy, consequently building our new framework MultiGait++. C$^2$Fusion preserves commonalities while highlighting differences to enrich the learning of gait features. To verify our findings and conclusions, extensive experiments on Gait3D, GREW, CCPG, and SUSTech1K are conducted. The code is available at https://github.com/ShiqiYu/OpenGait.

RefHCM: A Unified Model for Referring Perceptions in Human-Centric Scenarios

Human-centric perceptions play a crucial role in real-world applications. While recent human-centric works have achieved impressive progress, these efforts are often constrained to the visual domain and lack interaction with human instructions, limiting their applicability in broader scenarios such as chatbots and sports analysis. This paper introduces Referring Human Perceptions, where a referring prompt specifies the person of interest in an image. To tackle the new task, we propose RefHCM (Referring Human-Centric Model), a unified framework to integrate a wide range of human-centric referring tasks. Specifically, RefHCM employs sequence mergers to convert raw multimodal data -- including images, text, coordinates, and parsing maps -- into semantic tokens. This standardized representation enables RefHCM to reformulate diverse human-centric referring tasks into a sequence-to-sequence paradigm, solved using a plain encoder-decoder transformer architecture. Benefiting from a unified learning strategy, RefHCM effectively facilitates knowledge transfer across tasks and exhibits unforeseen capabilities in handling complex reasoning. This work represents the first attempt to address referring human perceptions with a general-purpose framework, while simultaneously establishing a corresponding benchmark that sets new standards for the field. Extensive experiments showcase RefHCM's competitive and even superior performance across multiple human-centric referring tasks. The code and data are publicly at https://github.com/JJJYmmm/RefHCM.

Attention with Dependency Parsing Augmentation for Fine-Grained Attribution

To assist humans in efficiently validating RAG-generated content, developing a fine-grained attribution mechanism that provides supporting evidence from retrieved documents for every answer span is essential. Existing fine-grained attribution methods rely on model-internal similarity metrics between responses and documents, such as saliency scores and hidden state similarity. However, these approaches suffer from either high computational complexity or coarse-grained representations. Additionally, a common problem shared by the previous works is their reliance on decoder-only Transformers, limiting their ability to incorporate contextual information after the target span. To address the above problems, we propose two techniques applicable to all model-internals-based methods. First, we aggregate token-wise evidence through set union operations, preserving the granularity of representations. Second, we enhance the attributor by integrating dependency parsing to enrich the semantic completeness of target spans. For practical implementation, our approach employs attention weights as the similarity metric. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms all prior works.

Digestion Algorithm in Hierarchical Symbolic Forests: A Fast Text Normalization Algorithm and Semantic Parsing Framework for Specific Scenarios and Lightweight Deployment

Text Normalization and Semantic Parsing have numerous applications in natural language processing, such as natural language programming, paraphrasing, data augmentation, constructing expert systems, text matching, and more. Despite the prominent achievements of deep learning in Large Language Models (LLMs), the interpretability of neural network architectures is still poor, which affects their credibility and hence limits the deployments of risk-sensitive scenarios. In certain scenario-specific domains with scarce data, rapidly obtaining a large number of supervised learning labels is challenging, and the workload of manually labeling data would be enormous. Catastrophic forgetting in neural networks further leads to low data utilization rates. In situations where swift responses are vital, the density of the model makes local deployment difficult and the response time long, which is not conducive to local applications of these fields. Inspired by the multiplication rule, a principle of combinatorial mathematics, and human thinking patterns, a multilayer framework along with its algorithm, the Digestion Algorithm in Hierarchical Symbolic Forests (DAHSF), is proposed to address these above issues, combining text normalization and semantic parsing workflows. The Chinese Scripting Language "Fire Bunny Intelligent Development Platform V2.0" is an important test and application of the technology discussed in this paper. DAHSF can run locally in scenario-specific domains on little datasets, with model size and memory usage optimized by at least two orders of magnitude, thus improving the execution speed, and possessing a promising optimization outlook.