OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
JELLY: Joint Emotion Recognition and Context Reasoning with LLMs for Conversational Speech Synthesis
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Recently, there has been a growing demand for conversational speech synthesis (CSS) that generates more natural speech by considering the conversational context. To address this, we introduce JELLY, a novel CSS framework that integrates emotion recognition and context reasoning for generating appropriate speech in conversation by fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) with multiple partial LoRA modules. We propose an Emotion-aware Q-former encoder, which enables the LLM to perceive emotions in speech. The encoder is trained to align speech emotions with text, utilizing datasets of emotional speech. The entire model is then fine-tuned with conversational speech data to infer emotional context for generating emotionally appropriate speech in conversation. Our experimental results demonstrate that JELLY excels in emotional context modeling, synthesizing speech that naturally aligns with conversation, while mitigating the scarcity of emotional conversational speech datasets.
Variable Bitrate Residual Vector Quantization for Audio Coding
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Recent state-of-the-art neural audio compression models have progressively adopted residual vector quantization (RVQ). Despite this success, these models employ a fixed number of codebooks per frame, which can be suboptimal in terms of rate-distortion tradeoff, particularly in scenarios with simple input audio, such as silence. To address this limitation, we propose variable bitrate RVQ (VRVQ) for audio codecs, which allows for more efficient coding by adapting the number of codebooks used per frame. Furthermore, we propose a gradient estimation method for the non-differentiable masking operation that transforms from the importance map to the binary importance mask, improving model training via a straight-through estimator. We demonstrate that the proposed training framework achieves superior results compared to the baseline method and shows further improvement when applied to the current state-of-the-art codec.
MAP Image Recovery with Guarantees using Locally Convex Multi-Scale Energy (LC-MUSE) Model
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

We propose a multi-scale deep energy model that is strongly convex in the local neighbourhood around the data manifold to represent its probability density, with application in inverse problems. In particular, we represent the negative log-prior as a multi-scale energy model parameterized by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). We restrict the gradient of the CNN to be locally monotone, which constrains the model as a Locally Convex Multi-Scale Energy (LC-MuSE). We use the learned energy model in image-based inverse problems, where the formulation offers several desirable properties: i) uniqueness of the solution, ii) convergence guarantees to a minimum of the inverse problem, and iii) robustness to input perturbations. In the context of parallel Magnetic Resonance (MR) image reconstruction, we show that the proposed method performs better than the state-of-the-art convex regularizers, while the performance is comparable to plug-and-play regularizers and end-to-end trained methods.
Spatial-Temporal Perception with Causal Inference for Naturalistic Driving Action Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Naturalistic driving action recognition is essential for vehicle cabin monitoring systems. However, the complexity of real-world backgrounds presents significant challenges for this task, and previous approaches have struggled with practical implementation due to their limited ability to observe subtle behavioral differences and effectively learn inter-frame features from video. In this paper, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Perception (STP) architecture that emphasizes both temporal information and spatial relationships between key objects, incorporating a causal decoder to perform behavior recognition and temporal action localization. Without requiring multimodal input, STP directly extracts temporal and spatial distance features from RGB video clips. Subsequently, these dual features are jointly encoded by maximizing the expected likelihood across all possible permutations of the factorization order. By integrating temporal and spatial features at different scales, STP can perceive subtle behavioral changes in challenging scenarios. Additionally, we introduce a causal-aware module to explore relationships between video frame features, significantly enhancing detection efficiency and performance. We validate the effectiveness of our approach using two publicly available driver distraction detection benchmarks. The results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Peer-to-Peer Learning Dynamics of Wide Neural Networks
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Peer-to-peer learning is an increasingly popular framework that enables beyond-5G distributed edge devices to collaboratively train deep neural networks in a privacy-preserving manner without the aid of a central server. Neural network training algorithms for emerging environments, e.g., smart cities, have many design considerations that are difficult to tune in deployment settings -- such as neural network architectures and hyperparameters. This presents a critical need for characterizing the training dynamics of distributed optimization algorithms used to train highly nonconvex neural networks in peer-to-peer learning environments. In this work, we provide an explicit characterization of the learning dynamics of wide neural networks trained using popular distributed gradient descent (DGD) algorithms. Our results leverage both recent advancements in neural tangent kernel (NTK) theory and extensive previous work on distributed learning and consensus. We validate our analytical results by accurately predicting the parameter and error dynamics of wide neural networks trained for classification tasks.
MusicMamba: A Dual-Feature Modeling Approach for Generating Chinese Traditional Music with Modal Precision
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

In recent years, deep learning has significantly advanced the MIDI domain, solidifying music generation as a key application of artificial intelligence. However, existing research primarily focuses on Western music and encounters challenges in generating melodies for Chinese traditional music, especially in capturing modal characteristics and emotional expression. To address these issues, we propose a new architecture, the Dual-Feature Modeling Module, which integrates the long-range dependency modeling of the Mamba Block with the global structure capturing capabilities of the Transformer Block. Additionally, we introduce the Bidirectional Mamba Fusion Layer, which integrates local details and global structures through bidirectional scanning, enhancing the modeling of complex sequences. Building on this architecture, we propose the REMI-M representation, which more accurately captures and generates modal information in melodies. To support this research, we developed FolkDB, a high-quality Chinese traditional music dataset encompassing various styles and totaling over 11 hours of music. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed architecture excels in generating melodies with Chinese traditional music characteristics, offering a new and effective solution for music generation.
BP-GPT: Auditory Neural Decoding Using fMRI-prompted LLM
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Decoding language information from brain signals represents a vital research area within brain-computer interfaces, particularly in the context of deciphering the semantic information from the fMRI signal. Although existing work uses LLM to achieve this goal, their method does not use an end-to-end approach and avoids the LLM in the mapping of fMRI-to-text, leaving space for the exploration of the LLM in auditory decoding. In this paper, we introduce a novel method, the Brain Prompt GPT (BP-GPT). By using the brain representation that is extracted from the fMRI as a prompt, our method can utilize GPT-2 to decode fMRI signals into stimulus text. Further, we introduce the text prompt and align the fMRI prompt to it. By introducing the text prompt, our BP-GPT can extract a more robust brain prompt and promote the decoding of pre-trained LLM. We evaluate our BP-GPT on the open-source auditory semantic decoding dataset and achieve a significant improvement up to 4.61 on METEOR and 2.43 on BERTScore across all the subjects compared to the state-of-the-art method. The experimental results demonstrate that using brain representation as a prompt to further drive LLM for auditory neural decoding is feasible and effective. The code is available at https://github.com/1994cxy/BP-GPT.
Uncertainty-Aware Robust Learning on Noisy Graphs
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have excelled in various graph learning tasks, particularly node classification. However, their performance is often hampered by noisy measurements in real-world graphs, which can corrupt critical patterns in the data. To address this, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware graph learning framework inspired by distributionally robust optimization. Specifically, we use a graph neural network-based encoder to embed the node features and find the optimal node embeddings by minimizing the worst-case risk through a minimax formulation. Such an uncertainty-aware learning process leads to improved node representations and a more robust graph predictive model that effectively mitigates the impact of uncertainty arising from data noise. Our experimental results demonstrate superior predictive performance over baselines across noisy scenarios.
Harnessing Contrastive Learning and Neural Transformation for Time Series Anomaly Detection
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) plays a vital role in many industrial applications. While contrastive learning has gained momentum in the time series domain for its prowess in extracting meaningful representations from unlabeled data, its straightforward application to anomaly detection is not without hurdles. Firstly, contrastive learning typically requires negative sampling to avoid the representation collapse issue, where the encoder converges to a constant solution. However, drawing from the same dataset for dissimilar samples is ill-suited for TSAD as most samples are ``normal'' in the training dataset. Secondly, conventional contrastive learning focuses on instance discrimination, which may overlook anomalies that are detectable when compared to their temporal context. In this study, we propose a novel approach, CNT, that incorporates a window-based contrastive learning strategy fortified with learnable transformations. This dual configuration focuses on capturing temporal anomalies in local regions while simultaneously mitigating the representation collapse issue. Our theoretical analysis validates the effectiveness of CNT in circumventing constant encoder solutions. Through extensive experiments on diverse real-world industrial datasets, we show the superiority of our framework by outperforming various baselines and model variants.
A Bayesian Interpretation of Adaptive Low-Rank Adaptation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Motivated by the sensitivity-based importance score of the adaptive low-rank adaptation (AdaLoRA), we utilize more theoretically supported metrics, including the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), along with the Improved Variational Online Newton (IVON) optimizer, for adaptive parameter budget allocation. The resulting Bayesian counterpart not only has matched or surpassed the performance of using the sensitivity-based importance metric but is also a faster alternative to AdaLoRA with Adam. Our theoretical analysis reveals a significant connection between the two metrics, providing a Bayesian perspective on the efficacy of sensitivity as an importance score. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the magnitude, rather than the variance, is the primary indicator of the importance of parameters.
Training-Free Point Cloud Recognition Based on Geometric and Semantic Information Fusion
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

The trend of employing training-free methods for point cloud recognition is becoming increasingly popular due to its significant reduction in computational resources and time costs. However, existing approaches are limited as they typically extract either geometric or semantic features. To address this limitation, we are the first to propose a novel training-free method that integrates both geometric and semantic features. For the geometric branch, we adopt a non-parametric strategy to extract geometric features. In the semantic branch, we leverage a model aligned with text features to obtain semantic features. Additionally, we introduce the GFE module to complement the geometric information of point clouds and the MFF module to improve performance in few-shot settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art training-free approaches on mainstream benchmark datasets, including ModelNet and ScanObiectNN.
KAN-HyperpointNet for Point Cloud Sequence-Based 3D Human Action Recognition
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Point cloud sequence-based 3D action recognition has achieved impressive performance and efficiency. However, existing point cloud sequence modeling methods cannot adequately balance the precision of limb micro-movements with the integrity of posture macro-structure, leading to the loss of crucial information cues in action inference. To overcome this limitation, we introduce D-Hyperpoint, a novel data type generated through a D-Hyperpoint Embedding module. D-Hyperpoint encapsulates both regional-momentary motion and global-static posture, effectively summarizing the unit human action at each moment. In addition, we present a D-Hyperpoint KANsMixer module, which is recursively applied to nested groupings of D-Hyperpoints to learn the action discrimination information and creatively integrates Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) to enhance spatio-temporal interaction within D-Hyperpoints. Finally, we propose KAN-HyperpointNet, a spatio-temporal decoupled network architecture for 3D action recognition. Extensive experiments on two public datasets: MSR Action3D and NTU-RGB+D 60, demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.
Leveraging Pre-Trained Models for Multimodal Class-Incremental Learning under Adaptive Fusion
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Unlike traditional Multimodal Class-Incremental Learning (MCIL) methods that focus only on vision and text, this paper explores MCIL across vision, audio and text modalities, addressing challenges in integrating complementary information and mitigating catastrophic forgetting. To tackle these issues, we propose an MCIL method based on multimodal pre-trained models. Firstly, a Multimodal Incremental Feature Extractor (MIFE) based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) structure is introduced to achieve effective incremental fine-tuning for AudioCLIP. Secondly, to enhance feature discriminability and generalization, we propose an Adaptive Audio-Visual Fusion Module (AAVFM) that includes a masking threshold mechanism and a dynamic feature fusion mechanism, along with a strategy to enhance text diversity. Thirdly, a novel multimodal class-incremental contrastive training loss is proposed to optimize cross-modal alignment in MCIL. Finally, two MCIL-specific evaluation metrics are introduced for comprehensive assessment. Extensive experiments on three multimodal datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.
UPCS: Unbiased Persona Construction for Dialogue Generation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Narrative systems, such as dialogue and storytelling systems, often utilize persona profiles to enhance personalized interactions. Existing persona profiles frequently exhibit biases, posing risks to system integrity and fairness. To address this, we introduce the UPCS framework, which categorizes character descriptions into eight dimensions, including bias mitigation strategies. Experimental results demonstrate UPCS's superiority in accuracy, diversity, bias elimination, and user satisfaction, marking a significant advancement in persona construction for reliable narrative systems.
Robust and Efficient Adversarial Defense in SNNs via Image Purification and Joint Detection
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) aim to bridge the gap between neuroscience and machine learning by emulating the structure of the human nervous system. However, like convolutional neural networks, SNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To tackle the challenge, we propose a biologically inspired methodology to enhance the robustness of SNNs, drawing insights from the visual masking effect and filtering theory. First, an end-to-end SNN-based image purification model is proposed to defend against adversarial attacks, including a noise extraction network and a non-blind denoising network. The former network extracts noise features from noisy images, while the latter component employs a residual U-Net structure to reconstruct high-quality noisy images and generate clean images. Simultaneously, a multi-level firing SNN based on Squeeze-and-Excitation Network is introduced to improve the robustness of the classifier. Crucially, the proposed image purification network serves as a pre-processing module, avoiding modifications to classifiers. Unlike adversarial training, our method is highly flexible and can be seamlessly integrated with other defense strategies. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate that the proposed methodology outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of defense effectiveness, training time, and resource consumption.
DrawSpeech: Expressive Speech Synthesis Using Prosodic Sketches as Control Conditions
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Controlling text-to-speech (TTS) systems to synthesize speech with the prosodic characteristics expected by users has attracted much attention. To achieve controllability, current studies focus on two main directions: (1) using reference speech as prosody prompt to guide speech synthesis, and (2) using natural language descriptions to control the generation process. However, finding reference speech that exactly contains the prosody that users want to synthesize takes a lot of effort. Description-based guidance in TTS systems can only determine the overall prosody, which has difficulty in achieving fine-grained prosody control over the synthesized speech. In this paper, we propose DrawSpeech, a sketch-conditioned diffusion model capable of generating speech based on any prosody sketches drawn by users. Specifically, the prosody sketches are fed to DrawSpeech to provide a rough indication of the expected prosody trends. DrawSpeech then recovers the detailed pitch and energy contours based on the coarse sketches and synthesizes the desired speech. Experimental results show that DrawSpeech can generate speech with a wide variety of prosody and can precisely control the fine-grained prosody in a user-friendly manner. Our implementation and audio samples are publicly available.
Audio Texture Manipulation by Exemplar-Based Analogy
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Audio texture manipulation involves modifying the perceptual characteristics of a sound to achieve specific transformations, such as adding, removing, or replacing auditory elements. In this paper, we propose an exemplar-based analogy model for audio texture manipulation. Instead of conditioning on text-based instructions, our method uses paired speech examples, where one clip represents the original sound and another illustrates the desired transformation. The model learns to apply the same transformation to new input, allowing for the manipulation of sound textures. We construct a quadruplet dataset representing various editing tasks, and train a latent diffusion model in a self-supervised manner. We show through quantitative evaluations and perceptual studies that our model outperforms text-conditioned baselines and generalizes to real-world, out-of-distribution, and non-speech scenarios. Project page: https://berkeley-speech-group.github.io/audio-texture-analogy/
SoundCollage: Automated Discovery of New Classes in Audio Datasets
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Developing new machine learning applications often requires the collection of new datasets. However, existing datasets may already contain relevant information to train models for new purposes. We propose SoundCollage: a framework to discover new classes within audio datasets by incorporating (1) an audio pre-processing pipeline to decompose different sounds in audio samples, and (2) an automated model-based annotation mechanism to identify the discovered classes. Furthermore, we introduce the clarity measure to assess the coherence of the discovered classes for better training new downstream applications. Our evaluations show that the accuracy of downstream audio classifiers within discovered class samples and a held-out dataset improves over the baseline by up to 34.7% and 4.5%, respectively. These results highlight the potential of SoundCollage in making datasets reusable by labeling with newly discovered classes. To encourage further research in this area, we open-source our code at https://github.com/nokia-bell-labs/audio-class-discovery.
Multi-Context Temporal Consistent Modeling for Referring Video Object Segmentation
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

Referring video object segmentation aims to segment objects within a video corresponding to a given text description. Existing transformer-based temporal modeling approaches face challenges related to query inconsistency and the limited consideration of context. Query inconsistency produces unstable masks of different objects in the middle of the video. The limited consideration of context leads to the segmentation of incorrect objects by failing to adequately account for the relationship between the given text and instances. To address these issues, we propose the Multi-context Temporal Consistency Module (MTCM), which consists of an Aligner and a Multi-Context Enhancer (MCE). The Aligner removes noise from queries and aligns them to achieve query consistency. The MCE predicts text-relevant queries by considering multi-context. We applied MTCM to four different models, increasing performance across all of them, particularly achieving 47.6 J&F on the MeViS. Code is available at https://github.com/Choi58/MTCM.
V2SFlow: Video-to-Speech Generation with Speech Decomposition and Rectified Flow
Venue: Conference ICASSP 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we introduce V2SFlow, a novel Video-to-Speech (V2S) framework designed to generate natural and intelligible speech directly from silent talking face videos. While recent V2S systems have shown promising results on constrained datasets with limited speakers and vocabularies, their performance often degrades on real-world, unconstrained datasets due to the inherent variability and complexity of speech signals. To address these challenges, we decompose the speech signal into manageable subspaces (content, pitch, and speaker information), each representing distinct speech attributes, and predict them directly from the visual input. To generate coherent and realistic speech from these predicted attributes, we employ a rectified flow matching decoder built on a Transformer architecture, which models efficient probabilistic pathways from random noise to the target speech distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that V2SFlow significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, even surpassing the naturalness of ground truth utterances. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/kaistmm/V2SFlow