CVAug 29, 2023Code
MSFlow: Multi-Scale Flow-based Framework for Unsupervised Anomaly DetectionYixuan Zhou, Xing Xu, Jingkuan Song et al.
Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) attracts a lot of research interest and drives widespread applications, where only anomaly-free samples are available for training. Some UAD applications intend to further locate the anomalous regions without any anomaly information. Although the absence of anomalous samples and annotations deteriorates the UAD performance, an inconspicuous yet powerful statistics model, the normalizing flows, is appropriate for anomaly detection and localization in an unsupervised fashion. The flow-based probabilistic models, only trained on anomaly-free data, can efficiently distinguish unpredictable anomalies by assigning them much lower likelihoods than normal data. Nevertheless, the size variation of unpredictable anomalies introduces another inconvenience to the flow-based methods for high-precision anomaly detection and localization. To generalize the anomaly size variation, we propose a novel Multi-Scale Flow-based framework dubbed MSFlow composed of asymmetrical parallel flows followed by a fusion flow to exchange multi-scale perceptions. Moreover, different multi-scale aggregation strategies are adopted for image-wise anomaly detection and pixel-wise anomaly localization according to the discrepancy between them. The proposed MSFlow is evaluated on three anomaly detection datasets, significantly outperforming existing methods. Notably, on the challenging MVTec AD benchmark, our MSFlow achieves a new state-of-the-art with a detection AUORC score of up to 99.7%, localization AUCROC score of 98.8%, and PRO score of 97.1%. The reproducible code is available at https://github.com/cool-xuan/msflow.
80.6ASMay 27Code
LoSATok: Low-dimensional Semantic-Acoustic Tokenizer for Cross-Domain Audio Understanding and GenerationZhisheng Zhang, Xiang Li, Yixuan Zhou et al.
Audio tokenizers are fundamental to unifying audio understanding and generation. Understanding requires high-level semantics, while generation demands semantic and acoustic details. Existing unified tokenizers jointly encode both in high-dimensional continuous latents, which increases the modeling burden of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for generation. We propose LoSATok, a low-dimensional audio tokenizer for cross-domain audio understanding and generation. Motivated by the observation that 1280-dimensional semantic encoder features are compressible, we introduce a Semantic Bottleneck that compresses them into 128 dimensions, regularized by the proposed time-relation loss for temporal feature consistency. We further design a dual-level semantic supervision method that leverages both high- and low-dimensional semantic signals, enabling the tokenizer to jointly capture semantics and acoustic details within a compact latent space. Experiments on speech, music, and general audio show that SemBo preserves strong low-dimensional semantic capacity and LoSATok retains competitive understanding performance compared with several semantic representations, while consistently improving DiT modeling performance on speech, music, and audio generation. These results demonstrate that LoSATok's low-dimensional representations can effectively support audio understanding and generation. Our code is provided at https://github.com/wxzyd123/LoSATok.
CVOct 12, 2023Code
X-HRNet: Towards Lightweight Human Pose Estimation with Spatially Unidimensional Self-AttentionYixuan Zhou, Xuanhan Wang, Xing Xu et al.
High-resolution representation is necessary for human pose estimation to achieve high performance, and the ensuing problem is high computational complexity. In particular, predominant pose estimation methods estimate human joints by 2D single-peak heatmaps. Each 2D heatmap can be horizontally and vertically projected to and reconstructed by a pair of 1D heat vectors. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a lightweight and powerful alternative, Spatially Unidimensional Self-Attention (SUSA), to the pointwise (1x1) convolution that is the main computational bottleneck in the depthwise separable 3c3 convolution. Our SUSA reduces the computational complexity of the pointwise (1x1) convolution by 96% without sacrificing accuracy. Furthermore, we use the SUSA as the main module to build our lightweight pose estimation backbone X-HRNet, where `X' represents the estimated cross-shape attention vectors. Extensive experiments on the COCO benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our X-HRNet, and comprehensive ablation studies show the effectiveness of the SUSA modules. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/cool-xuan/x-hrnet.
CVAug 15, 2023Code
ImbSAM: A Closer Look at Sharpness-Aware Minimization in Class-Imbalanced RecognitionYixuan Zhou, Yi Qu, Xing Xu et al.
Class imbalance is a common challenge in real-world recognition tasks, where the majority of classes have few samples, also known as tail classes. We address this challenge with the perspective of generalization and empirically find that the promising Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) fails to address generalization issues under the class-imbalanced setting. Through investigating this specific type of task, we identify that its generalization bottleneck primarily lies in the severe overfitting for tail classes with limited training data. To overcome this bottleneck, we leverage class priors to restrict the generalization scope of the class-agnostic SAM and propose a class-aware smoothness optimization algorithm named Imbalanced-SAM (ImbSAM). With the guidance of class priors, our ImbSAM specifically improves generalization targeting tail classes. We also verify the efficacy of ImbSAM on two prototypical applications of class-imbalanced recognition: long-tailed classification and semi-supervised anomaly detection, where our ImbSAM demonstrates remarkable performance improvements for tail classes and anomaly. Our code implementation is available at https://github.com/cool-xuan/Imbalanced_SAM.
CVSep 2, 2024Code
VQ-Flow: Taming Normalizing Flows for Multi-Class Anomaly Detection via Hierarchical Vector QuantizationYixuan Zhou, Xing Xu, Zhe Sun et al.
Normalizing flows, a category of probabilistic models famed for their capabilities in modeling complex data distributions, have exhibited remarkable efficacy in unsupervised anomaly detection. This paper explores the potential of normalizing flows in multi-class anomaly detection, wherein the normal data is compounded with multiple classes without providing class labels. Through the integration of vector quantization (VQ), we empower the flow models to distinguish different concepts of multi-class normal data in an unsupervised manner, resulting in a novel flow-based unified method, named VQ-Flow. Specifically, our VQ-Flow leverages hierarchical vector quantization to estimate two relative codebooks: a Conceptual Prototype Codebook (CPC) for concept distinction and its concomitant Concept-Specific Pattern Codebook (CSPC) to capture concept-specific normal patterns. The flow models in VQ-Flow are conditioned on the concept-specific patterns captured in CSPC, capable of modeling specific normal patterns associated with different concepts. Moreover, CPC further enables our VQ-Flow for concept-aware distribution modeling, faithfully mimicking the intricate multi-class normal distribution through a mixed Gaussian distribution reparametrized on the conceptual prototypes. Through the introduction of vector quantization, the proposed VQ-Flow advances the state-of-the-art in multi-class anomaly detection within a unified training scheme, yielding the Det./Loc. AUROC of 99.5%/98.3% on MVTec AD. The codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/cool-xuan/vqflow.
CVJun 21, 2022
KTN: Knowledge Transfer Network for Learning Multi-person 2D-3D CorrespondencesXuanhan Wang, Lianli Gao, Yixuan Zhou et al.
Human densepose estimation, aiming at establishing dense correspondences between 2D pixels of human body and 3D human body template, is a key technique in enabling machines to have an understanding of people in images. It still poses several challenges due to practical scenarios where real-world scenes are complex and only partial annotations are available, leading to incompelete or false estimations. In this work, we present a novel framework to detect the densepose of multiple people in an image. The proposed method, which we refer to Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), tackles two main problems: 1) how to refine image representation for alleviating incomplete estimations, and 2) how to reduce false estimation caused by the low-quality training labels (i.e., limited annotations and class-imbalance labels). Unlike existing works directly propagating the pyramidal features of regions for densepose estimation, the KTN uses a refinement of pyramidal representation, where it simultaneously maintains feature resolution and suppresses background pixels, and this strategy results in a substantial increase in accuracy. Moreover, the KTN enhances the ability of 3D based body parsing with external knowledges, where it casts 2D based body parsers trained from sufficient annotations as a 3D based body parser through a structural body knowledge graph. In this way, it significantly reduces the adverse effects caused by the low-quality annotations. The effectiveness of KTN is demonstrated by its superior performance to the state-of-the-art methods on DensePose-COCO dataset. Extensive ablation studies and experimental results on representative tasks (e.g., human body segmentation, human part segmentation and keypoints detection) and two popular densepose estimation pipelines (i.e., RCNN and fully-convolutional frameworks), further indicate the generalizability of the proposed method.
CVNov 26, 2023Code
BatchNorm-based Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly DetectionYixuan Zhou, Yi Qu, Xing Xu et al.
In weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WVAD), where only video-level labels indicating the presence or absence of abnormal events are available, the primary challenge arises from the inherent ambiguity in temporal annotations of abnormal occurrences. Inspired by the statistical insight that temporal features of abnormal events often exhibit outlier characteristics, we propose a novel method, BN-WVAD, which incorporates BatchNorm into WVAD. In the proposed BN-WVAD, we leverage the Divergence of Feature from Mean vector (DFM) of BatchNorm as a reliable abnormality criterion to discern potential abnormal snippets in abnormal videos. The proposed DFM criterion is also discriminative for anomaly recognition and more resilient to label noise, serving as the additional anomaly score to amend the prediction of the anomaly classifier that is susceptible to noisy labels. Moreover, a batch-level selection strategy is devised to filter more abnormal snippets in videos where more abnormal events occur. The proposed BN-WVAD model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on UCF-Crime with an AUC of 87.24%, and XD-Violence, where AP reaches up to 84.93%. Our code implementation is accessible at https://github.com/cool-xuan/BN-WVAD.
SDMar 23, 2022
Towards Expressive Speaking Style Modelling with Hierarchical Context Information for Mandarin Speech SynthesisShun Lei, Yixuan Zhou, Liyang Chen et al.
Previous works on expressive speech synthesis mainly focus on current sentence. The context in adjacent sentences is neglected, resulting in inflexible speaking style for the same text, which lacks speech variations. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical framework to model speaking style from context. A hierarchical context encoder is proposed to explore a wider range of contextual information considering structural relationship in context, including inter-phrase and inter-sentence relations. Moreover, to encourage this encoder to learn style representation better, we introduce a novel training strategy with knowledge distillation, which provides the target for encoder training. Both objective and subjective evaluations on a Mandarin lecture dataset demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly improve the naturalness and expressiveness of the synthesized speech.
SDAug 31, 2023
Towards Spontaneous Style Modeling with Semi-supervised Pre-training for Conversational Text-to-Speech SynthesisWeiqin Li, Shun Lei, Qiaochu Huang et al.
The spontaneous behavior that often occurs in conversations makes speech more human-like compared to reading-style. However, synthesizing spontaneous-style speech is challenging due to the lack of high-quality spontaneous datasets and the high cost of labeling spontaneous behavior. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised pre-training method to increase the amount of spontaneous-style speech and spontaneous behavioral labels. In the process of semi-supervised learning, both text and speech information are considered for detecting spontaneous behaviors labels in speech. Moreover, a linguistic-aware encoder is used to model the relationship between each sentence in the conversation. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method achieves superior expressive speech synthesis performance with the ability to model spontaneous behavior in spontaneous-style speech and predict reasonable spontaneous behavior from text.
SDJul 18, 2024
Spontaneous Style Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Controllable Spontaneous Behaviors Based on Language ModelsWeiqin Li, Peiji Yang, Yicheng Zhong et al.
Spontaneous style speech synthesis, which aims to generate human-like speech, often encounters challenges due to the scarcity of high-quality data and limitations in model capabilities. Recent language model-based TTS systems can be trained on large, diverse, and low-quality speech datasets, resulting in highly natural synthesized speech. However, they are limited by the difficulty of simulating various spontaneous behaviors and capturing prosody variations in spontaneous speech. In this paper, we propose a novel spontaneous speech synthesis system based on language models. We systematically categorize and uniformly model diverse spontaneous behaviors. Moreover, fine-grained prosody modeling is introduced to enhance the model's ability to capture subtle prosody variations in spontaneous speech.Experimental results show that our proposed method significantly outperforms the baseline methods in terms of prosody naturalness and spontaneous behavior naturalness.
SDSep 9, 2024
SongCreator: Lyrics-based Universal Song GenerationShun Lei, Yixuan Zhou, Boshi Tang et al.
Music is an integral part of human culture, embodying human intelligence and creativity, of which songs compose an essential part. While various aspects of song generation have been explored by previous works, such as singing voice, vocal composition and instrumental arrangement, etc., generating songs with both vocals and accompaniment given lyrics remains a significant challenge, hindering the application of music generation models in the real world. In this light, we propose SongCreator, a song-generation system designed to tackle this challenge. The model features two novel designs: a meticulously designed dual-sequence language model (DSLM) to capture the information of vocals and accompaniment for song generation, and a series of attention mask strategies for DSLM, which allows our model to understand, generate and edit songs, making it suitable for various songrelated generation tasks by utilizing specific attention masks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SongCreator by achieving state-of-the-art or competitive performances on all eight tasks. Notably, it surpasses previous works by a large margin in lyrics-to-song and lyrics-to-vocals. Additionally, it is able to independently control the acoustic conditions of the vocals and accompaniment in the generated song through different audio prompts, exhibiting its potential applicability. Our samples are available at https://thuhcsi.github.io/SongCreator/.
QMJan 29
Early warning prediction: Onsager-Machlup vs SchrödingerXiaoai Xu, Yixuan Zhou, Xiang Zhou et al.
Predicting critical transitions in complex systems, such as epileptic seizures in the brain, represents a major challenge in scientific research. The high-dimensional characteristics and hidden critical signals further complicate early-warning tasks. This study proposes a novel early-warning framework that integrates manifold learning with stochastic dynamical system modeling. Through systematic comparison, six methods including diffusion maps (DM) are selected to construct low-dimensional representations. Based on these, a data-driven stochastic differential equation model is established to robustly estimate the probability evolution scoring function of the system. Building on this, a new Score Function (SF) indicator is defined by incorporating Schrödinger bridge theory to quantify the likelihood of significant state transitions in the system. Experiments demonstrate that this indicator exhibits higher sensitivity and robustness in epilepsy prediction, enables earlier identification of critical points, and clearly captures dynamic features across various stages before and after seizure onset. This work provides a systematic theoretical framework and practical methodology for extracting early-warning signals from high-dimensional data.
CVJun 4, 2025Code
Zero-Shot Temporal Interaction Localization for Egocentric VideosErhang Zhang, Junyi Ma, Yin-Dong Zheng et al.
Locating human-object interaction (HOI) actions within video serves as the foundation for multiple downstream tasks, such as human behavior analysis and human-robot skill transfer. Current temporal action localization methods typically rely on annotated action and object categories of interactions for optimization, which leads to domain bias and low deployment efficiency. Although some recent works have achieved zero-shot temporal action localization (ZS-TAL) with large vision-language models (VLMs), their coarse-grained estimations and open-loop pipelines hinder further performance improvements for temporal interaction localization (TIL). To address these issues, we propose a novel zero-shot TIL approach dubbed EgoLoc to locate the timings of grasp actions for human-object interaction in egocentric videos. EgoLoc introduces a self-adaptive sampling strategy to generate reasonable visual prompts for VLM reasoning. By absorbing both 2D and 3D observations, it directly samples high-quality initial guesses around the possible contact/separation timestamps of HOI according to 3D hand velocities, leading to high inference accuracy and efficiency. In addition, EgoLoc generates closed-loop feedback from visual and dynamic cues to further refine the localization results. Comprehensive experiments on the publicly available dataset and our newly proposed benchmark demonstrate that EgoLoc achieves better temporal interaction localization for egocentric videos compared to state-of-the-art baselines. We have released our code and relevant data as open-source at https://github.com/IRMVLab/EgoLoc.
SDJan 4Code
UltraEval-Audio: A Unified Framework for Comprehensive Evaluation of Audio Foundation ModelsQundong Shi, Jie Zhou, Biyuan Lin et al.
The development of audio foundation models has accelerated rapidly since the emergence of GPT-4o. However, the lack of comprehensive evaluation has become a critical bottleneck for further progress in the field, particularly in audio generation. Current audio evaluation faces three major challenges: (1) audio evaluation lacks a unified framework, with datasets and code scattered across various sources, hindering fair and efficient cross-model comparison;(2) audio codecs, as a key component of audio foundation models, lack a widely accepted and holistic evaluation methodology; (3) existing speech benchmarks are heavily reliant on English, making it challenging to objectively assess models' performance on Chinese. To address the first issue, we introduce UltraEval-Audio, a unified evaluation framework for audio foundation models, specifically designed for both audio understanding and generation tasks. UltraEval-Audio features a modular architecture, supporting 10 languages and 14 core task categories, while seamlessly integrating 24 mainstream models and 36 authoritative benchmarks. To enhance research efficiency, the framework provides a one-command evaluation feature, accompanied by real-time public leaderboards. For the second challenge, UltraEval-Audio adopts a novel comprehensive evaluation scheme for audio codecs, evaluating performance across three key dimensions: semantic accuracy, timbre fidelity, and acoustic quality. To address the third issue, we propose two new Chinese benchmarks, SpeechCMMLU and SpeechHSK, designed to assess Chinese knowledge proficiency and language fluency. We wish that UltraEval-Audio will provide both academia and industry with a transparent, efficient, and fair platform for comparison of audio models. Our code, benchmarks, and leaderboards are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/UltraEval-Audio.
CVAug 17, 2025Code
EgoLoc: A Generalizable Solution for Temporal Interaction Localization in Egocentric VideosJunyi Ma, Erhang Zhang, Yin-Dong Zheng et al.
Analyzing hand-object interaction in egocentric vision facilitates VR/AR applications and human-robot policy transfer. Existing research has mostly focused on modeling the behavior paradigm of interactive actions (i.e., ``how to interact''). However, the more challenging and fine-grained problem of capturing the critical moments of contact and separation between the hand and the target object (i.e., ``when to interact'') is still underexplored, which is crucial for immersive interactive experiences in mixed reality and robotic motion planning. Therefore, we formulate this problem as temporal interaction localization (TIL). Some recent works extract semantic masks as TIL references, but suffer from inaccurate object grounding and cluttered scenarios. Although current temporal action localization (TAL) methods perform well in detecting verb-noun action segments, they rely on category annotations during training and exhibit limited precision in localizing hand-object contact/separation moments. To address these issues, we propose a novel zero-shot approach dubbed EgoLoc to localize hand-object contact and separation timestamps in egocentric videos. EgoLoc introduces hand-dynamics-guided sampling to generate high-quality visual prompts. It exploits the vision-language model to identify contact/separation attributes, localize specific timestamps, and provide closed-loop feedback for further refinement. EgoLoc eliminates the need for object masks and verb-noun taxonomies, leading to generalizable zero-shot implementation. Comprehensive experiments on the public dataset and our novel benchmarks demonstrate that EgoLoc achieves plausible TIL for egocentric videos. It is also validated to effectively facilitate multiple downstream applications in egocentric vision and robotic manipulation tasks. Code and relevant data will be released at https://github.com/IRMVLab/EgoLoc.
LGMay 30, 2023Code
AnoOnly: Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection with the Only Loss on AnomaliesYixuan Zhou, Peiyu Yang, Yi Qu et al.
Semi-supervised anomaly detection (SSAD) methods have demonstrated their effectiveness in enhancing unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) by leveraging few-shot but instructive abnormal instances. However, the dominance of homogeneous normal data over anomalies biases the SSAD models against effectively perceiving anomalies. To address this issue and achieve balanced supervision between heavily imbalanced normal and abnormal data, we develop a novel framework called AnoOnly (Anomaly Only). Unlike existing SSAD methods that resort to strict loss supervision, AnoOnly suspends it and introduces a form of weak supervision for normal data. This weak supervision is instantiated through the utilization of batch normalization, which implicitly performs cluster learning on normal data. When integrated into existing SSAD methods, the proposed AnoOnly demonstrates remarkable performance enhancements across various models and datasets, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. Additionally, our AnoOnly is natively robust to label noise when suffering from data contamination. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/cool-xuan/AnoOnly.
26.1ROMar 19
CSSDF-Net: Safe Motion Planning Based on Neural Implicit Representations of Configuration Space Distance FieldHaohua Chen, Yixuan Zhou, Yifan Zhou et al.
High-dimensional manipulator operation in unstructured environments requires a differentiable, scene-agnostic distance query mechanism to guide safe motion generation. Existing geometric collision checkers are typically non-differentiable, while workspace-based implicit distance models are hindered by the highly nonlinear workspace--configuration mapping and often suffer from poor convergence; moreover, self-collision and environment collision are commonly handled as separate constraints. We propose Configuration-Space Signed Distance Field-Net (CSSDF-Net), which learns a continuous signed distance field directly in configuration space to provide joint-space distance and gradient queries under a unified geometric notion of safety. To enable zero-shot generalization without environment-specific retraining, we introduce a spatial-hashing-based data generation pipeline that encodes robot-centric geometric priors and supports efficient retrieval of risk configurations for arbitrary obstacle point sets. The learned distance field is integrated into safety-constrained trajectory optimization and receding-horizon MPC, enabling both offline planning and online reactive avoidance. Experiments on a planar arm and a 7-DoF manipulator demonstrate stable gradients, effective collision avoidance in static and dynamic scenes, and practical inference latency for large-scale point-cloud queries, supporting deployment in previously unseen environments.
SDFeb 27, 2025
DiffCSS: Diverse and Expressive Conversational Speech Synthesis with Diffusion ModelsWeihao wu, Zhiwei Lin, Yixuan Zhou et al.
Conversational speech synthesis (CSS) aims to synthesize both contextually appropriate and expressive speech, and considerable efforts have been made to enhance the understanding of conversational context. However, existing CSS systems are limited to deterministic prediction, overlooking the diversity of potential responses. Moreover, they rarely employ language model (LM)-based TTS backbones, limiting the naturalness and quality of synthesized speech. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose DiffCSS, an innovative CSS framework that leverages diffusion models and an LM-based TTS backbone to generate diverse, expressive, and contextually coherent speech. A diffusion-based context-aware prosody predictor is proposed to sample diverse prosody embeddings conditioned on multimodal conversational context. Then a prosody-controllable LM-based TTS backbone is developed to synthesize high-quality speech with sampled prosody embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate that the synthesized speech from DiffCSS is more diverse, contextually coherent, and expressive than existing CSS systems
AIMay 23, 2025
Probe by Gaming: A Game-based Benchmark for Assessing Conceptual Knowledge in LLMsShuhang Xu, Weijian Deng, Yixuan Zhou et al.
Concepts represent generalized abstractions that enable humans to categorize and reason efficiently, yet it is unclear to what extent Large Language Models (LLMs) comprehend these semantic relationships. Existing benchmarks typically focus on factual recall and isolated tasks, failing to evaluate the ability of LLMs to understand conceptual boundaries. To address this gap, we introduce CK-Arena, a multi-agent interaction game built upon the Undercover game, designed to evaluate the capacity of LLMs to reason with concepts in interactive settings. CK-Arena challenges models to describe, differentiate, and infer conceptual boundaries based on partial information, encouraging models to explore commonalities and distinctions between closely related concepts. By simulating real-world interaction, CK-Arena provides a scalable and realistic benchmark for assessing conceptual reasoning in dynamic environments. Experimental results show that LLMs' understanding of conceptual knowledge varies significantly across different categories and is not strictly aligned with parameter size or general model capabilities. The data and code are available at the project homepage: https://ck-arena.site.
CLMar 31, 2022
A Character-level Span-based Model for Mandarin Prosodic Structure PredictionXueyuan Chen, Changhe Song, Yixuan Zhou et al.
The accuracy of prosodic structure prediction is crucial to the naturalness of synthesized speech in Mandarin text-to-speech system, but now is limited by widely-used sequence-to-sequence framework and error accumulation from previous word segmentation results. In this paper, we propose a span-based Mandarin prosodic structure prediction model to obtain an optimal prosodic structure tree, which can be converted to corresponding prosodic label sequence. Instead of the prerequisite for word segmentation, rich linguistic features are provided by Chinese character-level BERT and sent to encoder with self-attention architecture. On top of this, span representation and label scoring are used to describe all possible prosodic structure trees, of which each tree has its corresponding score. To find the optimal tree with the highest score for a given sentence, a bottom-up CKY-style algorithm is further used. The proposed method can predict prosodic labels of different levels at the same time and accomplish the process directly from Chinese characters in an end-to-end manner. Experiment results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the excellent performance of our span-based method over all sequence-to-sequence baseline approaches.
LGJan 26, 2022
Post-training Quantization for Neural Networks with Provable GuaranteesJinjie Zhang, Yixuan Zhou, Rayan Saab
While neural networks have been remarkably successful in a wide array of applications, implementing them in resource-constrained hardware remains an area of intense research. By replacing the weights of a neural network with quantized (e.g., 4-bit, or binary) counterparts, massive savings in computation cost, memory, and power consumption are attained. To that end, we generalize a post-training neural-network quantization method, GPFQ, that is based on a greedy path-following mechanism. Among other things, we propose modifications to promote sparsity of the weights, and rigorously analyze the associated error. Additionally, our error analysis expands the results of previous work on GPFQ to handle general quantization alphabets, showing that for quantizing a single-layer network, the relative square error essentially decays linearly in the number of weights -- i.e., level of over-parametrization. Our result holds across a range of input distributions and for both fully-connected and convolutional architectures thereby also extending previous results. To empirically evaluate the method, we quantize several common architectures with few bits per weight, and test them on ImageNet, showing only minor loss of accuracy compared to unquantized models. We also demonstrate that standard modifications, such as bias correction and mixed precision quantization, further improve accuracy.
CLApr 14, 2021
Enhancing Word-Level Semantic Representation via Dependency Structure for Expressive Text-to-Speech SynthesisYixuan Zhou, Changhe Song, Jingbei Li et al.
Exploiting rich linguistic information in raw text is crucial for expressive text-to-speech (TTS). As large scale pre-trained text representation develops, bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT) has been proven to embody semantic information and employed to TTS recently. However, original or simply fine-tuned BERT embeddings still cannot provide sufficient semantic knowledge that expressive TTS models should take into account. In this paper, we propose a word-level semantic representation enhancing method based on dependency structure and pre-trained BERT embedding. The BERT embedding of each word is reprocessed considering its specific dependencies and related words in the sentence, to generate more effective semantic representation for TTS. To better utilize the dependency structure, relational gated graph network (RGGN) is introduced to make semantic information flow and aggregate through the dependency structure. The experimental results show that the proposed method can further improve the naturalness and expressiveness of synthesized speeches on both Mandarin and English datasets.
CLDec 13, 2020
Syntactic representation learning for neural network based TTS with syntactic parse tree traversalChanghe Song, Jingbei Li, Yixuan Zhou et al.
Syntactic structure of a sentence text is correlated with the prosodic structure of the speech that is crucial for improving the prosody and naturalness of a text-to-speech (TTS) system. Nowadays TTS systems usually try to incorporate syntactic structure information with manually designed features based on expert knowledge. In this paper, we propose a syntactic representation learning method based on syntactic parse tree traversal to automatically utilize the syntactic structure information. Two constituent label sequences are linearized through left-first and right-first traversals from constituent parse tree. Syntactic representations are then extracted at word level from each constituent label sequence by a corresponding uni-directional gated recurrent unit (GRU) network. Meanwhile, nuclear-norm maximization loss is introduced to enhance the discriminability and diversity of the embeddings of constituent labels. Upsampled syntactic representations and phoneme embeddings are concatenated to serve as the encoder input of Tacotron2. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, with mean opinion score (MOS) increasing from 3.70 to 3.82 and ABX preference exceeding by 17% compared with the baseline. In addition, for sentences with multiple syntactic parse trees, prosodic differences can be clearly perceived from the synthesized speeches.