Ming Tao

Ming Tao, Bing-Kun Bao, Hao Tang et al.

Synthesizing high-fidelity complex images from text is challenging. Based on large pretraining, the autoregressive and diffusion models can synthesize photo-realistic images. Although these large models have shown notable progress, there remain three flaws. 1) These models require tremendous training data and parameters to achieve good performance. 2) The multi-step generation design slows the image synthesis process heavily. 3) The synthesized visual features are difficult to control and require delicately designed prompts. To enable high-quality, efficient, fast, and controllable text-to-image synthesis, we propose Generative Adversarial CLIPs, namely GALIP. GALIP leverages the powerful pretrained CLIP model both in the discriminator and generator. Specifically, we propose a CLIP-based discriminator. The complex scene understanding ability of CLIP enables the discriminator to accurately assess the image quality. Furthermore, we propose a CLIP-empowered generator that induces the visual concepts from CLIP through bridge features and prompts. The CLIP-integrated generator and discriminator boost training efficiency, and as a result, our model only requires about 3% training data and 6% learnable parameters, achieving comparable results to large pretrained autoregressive and diffusion models. Moreover, our model achieves 120 times faster synthesis speed and inherits the smooth latent space from GAN. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the excellent performance of our GALIP. Code is available at https://github.com/tobran/GALIP.

Ming Tao, Bing-Kun Bao, Hao Tang et al.

Text-guided image editing models have shown remarkable results. However, there remain two problems. First, they employ fixed manipulation modules for various editing requirements (e.g., color changing, texture changing, content adding and removing), which results in over-editing or insufficient editing. Second, they do not clearly distinguish between text-required and text-irrelevant parts, which leads to inaccurate editing. To solve these limitations, we propose: (i) a Dynamic Editing Block (DEBlock) which composes different editing modules dynamically for various editing requirements. (ii) a Composition Predictor (Comp-Pred) which predicts the composition weights for DEBlock according to the inference on target texts and source images. (iii) a Dynamic text-adaptive Convolution Block (DCBlock) which queries source image features to distinguish text-required parts and text-irrelevant parts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DE-Net achieves excellent performance and manipulates source images more correctly and accurately. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/tobran/DE-Net}.

Zhuoying Zhao, Ziling Tan, Pinghui Mo et al.

This paper proposes a special-purpose system to achieve high-accuracy and high-efficiency machine learning (ML) molecular dynamics (MD) calculations. The system consists of field programmable gate array (FPGA) and application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) working in heterogeneous parallelization. To be specific, a multiplication-less neural network (NN) is deployed on the non-von Neumann (NvN)-based ASIC (SilTerra 180 nm process) to evaluate atomic forces, which is the most computationally expensive part of MD. All other calculations of MD are done using FPGA (Xilinx XC7Z100). It is shown that, to achieve similar-level accuracy, the proposed NvN-based system based on low-end fabrication technologies (180 nm) is 1.6x faster and 10^2-10^3x more energy efficiency than state-of-the-art vN based MLMD using graphics processing units (GPUs) based on much more advanced technologies (12 nm), indicating superiority of the proposed NvN-based heterogeneous parallel architecture.

Jiale Qian, Hao Meng, Tian Zheng et al.

While recent years have witnessed rapid progress in speech synthesis, open-source singing voice synthesis (SVS) systems still face significant barriers to industrial deployment, particularly in terms of robustness and zero-shot generalization. In this report, we introduce SoulX-Singer, a high-quality open-source SVS system designed with practical deployment considerations in mind. SoulX-Singer supports controllable singing generation conditioned on either symbolic musical scores (MIDI) or melodic representations, enabling flexible and expressive control in real-world production workflows. Trained on more than 42,000 hours of vocal data, the system supports Mandarin Chinese, English, and Cantonese and consistently achieves state-of-the-art synthesis quality across languages under diverse musical conditions. Furthermore, to enable reliable evaluation of zero-shot SVS performance in practical scenarios, we construct SoulX-Singer-Eval, a dedicated benchmark with strict training-test disentanglement, facilitating systematic assessment in zero-shot settings.

Zhengcen Li, Chenyang Jiang, Liangxu Su et al.

AI-generated content (AIGC) is rapidly improving, creating an urgent need for detectors that generalize across data sources, deployment pipelines, and visual modalities. A strongly generalizable detector should remain robust under distributional variations. However, we identify a consistent failure mode: SOTA AI-generated image detectors often collapse when applied to frames extracted from videos. Through systematic analysis, we show that this cross-modal gap arises from both entangled synthesis-agnostic video processing shifts, including color conversion, codec compression, resizing, and blur, and model-specific fingerprints introduced by modern video generators. Motivated by these findings, we propose VINA (Video as Natural Augmentation), a unified AIGC detection framework that jointly trains on image and video data. VINA uses video frames as physically grounded natural augmentations and further introduces a cross-modal supervised contrastive objective to align image and video representations under a shared real/fake decision boundary. Extensive experiments on 14 image, video, and in-the-wild benchmarks show that VINA delivers bidirectional gains, improves robustness and transferability, and achieves state-of-the-art performance across nearly all evaluated settings without complex augmentation or dataset-specific tuning.

Ming Tao, Bing-Kun Bao, Hao Tang et al.

Story visualization aims to generate a series of realistic and coherent images based on a storyline. Current models adopt a frame-by-frame architecture by transforming the pre-trained text-to-image model into an auto-regressive manner. Although these models have shown notable progress, there are still three flaws. 1) The unidirectional generation of auto-regressive manner restricts the usability in many scenarios. 2) The additional introduced story history encoders bring an extremely high computational cost. 3) The story visualization and continuation models are trained and inferred independently, which is not user-friendly. To these ends, we propose a bidirectional, unified, and efficient framework, namely StoryImager. The StoryImager enhances the storyboard generative ability inherited from the pre-trained text-to-image model for a bidirectional generation. Specifically, we introduce a Target Frame Masking Strategy to extend and unify different story image generation tasks. Furthermore, we propose a Frame-Story Cross Attention Module that decomposes the cross attention for local fidelity and global coherence. Moreover, we design a Contextual Feature Extractor to extract contextual information from the whole storyline. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the excellent performance of our StoryImager. The code is available at https://github.com/tobran/StoryImager.

Anbin QI, Zhongliang Liu, Xinyong Zhou et al.

In this paper, we present our solution for the Second Multimodal Emotion Recognition Challenge Track 1(MER2024-SEMI). To enhance the accuracy and generalization performance of emotion recognition, we propose several methods for Multimodal Emotion Recognition. Firstly, we introduce EmoVCLIP, a model fine-tuned based on CLIP using vision-language prompt learning, designed for video-based emotion recognition tasks. By leveraging prompt learning on CLIP, EmoVCLIP improves the performance of pre-trained CLIP on emotional videos. Additionally, to address the issue of modality dependence in multimodal fusion, we employ modality dropout for robust information fusion. Furthermore, to aid Baichuan in better extracting emotional information, we suggest using GPT-4 as the prompt for Baichuan. Lastly, we utilize a self-training strategy to leverage unlabeled videos. In this process, we use unlabeled videos with high-confidence pseudo-labels generated by our model and incorporate them into the training set. Experimental results demonstrate that our model ranks 1st in the MER2024-SEMI track, achieving an accuracy of 90.15% on the test set.

Dingcheng Zhen, Xu Zheng, Ruixin Zhang et al.

Autoregressive (AR) diffusion models offer a promising framework for sequential generation tasks such as video synthesis by combining diffusion modeling with causal inference. Although they support streaming generation, existing AR diffusion methods struggle to scale efficiently. In this paper, we identify two key challenges in hour-scale real-time human animation. First, most forcing strategies propagate sample-level representations with mismatched diffusion states, causing inconsistent learning signals and unstable convergence. Second, historical representations grow unbounded and lack structure, preventing effective reuse of cached states and severely limiting inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose Neighbor Forcing, a diffusion-step-consistent AR formulation that propagates temporally adjacent frames as latent neighbors under the same noise condition. This design provides a distribution-aligned and stable learning signal while preserving drifting throughout the AR chain. Building upon this, we introduce a structured ConvKV memory mechanism that compresses the keys and values in causal attention into a fixed-length representation, enabling constant-memory inference and truly infinite video generation without relying on short-term motion-frame memory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves training convergence, hour-scale generation quality, and inference efficiency compared to existing AR diffusion methods. Numerically, LiveAct enables hour-scale real-time human animation and supports 20 FPS real-time streaming inference on as few as two NVIDIA H100 or H200 GPUs. Quantitative results demonstrate that our method attains state-of-the-art performance in lip-sync accuracy, human animation quality, and emotional expressiveness, with the lowest inference cost.

Ming Tao, Bing-Kun Bao, Yaowei Wang et al.

Large pretrained diffusion models have demonstrated impressive generation capabilities and have been adapted to various downstream tasks. However, unlike Large Language Models (LLMs) that can learn multiple tasks in a single model based on instructed data, diffusion models always require additional branches, task-specific training strategies, and losses for effective adaptation to different downstream tasks. This task-specific fine-tuning approach brings two drawbacks. 1) The task-specific additional networks create gaps between pretraining and fine-tuning which hinders the transfer of pretrained knowledge. 2) It necessitates careful additional network design, raising the barrier to learning and implementation, and making it less user-friendly. Thus, a question arises: Can we achieve a simple, efficient, and general approach to fine-tune diffusion models? To this end, we propose ONE-PIC. It enhances the inherited generative ability in the pretrained diffusion models without introducing additional modules. Specifically, we propose In-Visual-Context Tuning, which constructs task-specific training data by arranging source images and target images into a single image. This approach makes downstream fine-tuning closer to the pertaining, allowing our model to adapt more quickly to various downstream tasks. Moreover, we propose a Masking Strategy to unify different generative tasks. This strategy transforms various downstream fine-tuning tasks into predictions of the masked portions. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method is simple and efficient which streamlines the adaptation process and achieves excellent performance with lower costs. Code is available at https://github.com/tobran/ONE-PIC.

Yuhang Dai, Haopeng Lin, Jiale Qian et al.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in end-to-end speaker diarization and recognition. However, their speaker discriminability remains limited due to the scarcity of large-scale conversational data and the absence of explicit speaker representation optimization. To address this, we propose GLSC-SDR, a paradigm that jointly trains speaker classification with diarization and recognition. We further introduce a Global-Local Speaker Classification strategy, which uses clustered speakers as global labels and re-encoded intra-cluster speakers as local labels. This hierarchical design enhances fine-grained speaker discrimination while preserving semantic transcription accuracy. Experiments on AliMeeting, AISHELL-4, and AMI-SDM demonstrate that GLSC-SDR achieves competitive or superior performance compared to simulation-based and multi-encoder approaches, without relying on large-scale real conversational data.

Le Shen, Qian Qiao, Tan Yu et al.

Deploying massive diffusion models for real-time, infinite-duration, audio-driven avatar generation presents a significant engineering challenge, primarily due to the conflict between computational load and strict latency constraints. Existing approaches often compromise visual fidelity by enforcing strictly unidirectional attention mechanisms or reducing model capacity. To address this problem, we introduce \textbf{SoulX-FlashTalk}, a 14B-parameter framework optimized for high-fidelity real-time streaming. Diverging from conventional unidirectional paradigms, we use a \textbf{Self-correcting Bidirectional Distillation} strategy that retains bidirectional attention within video chunks. This design preserves critical spatiotemporal correlations, significantly enhancing motion coherence and visual detail. To ensure stability during infinite generation, we incorporate a \textbf{Multi-step Retrospective Self-Correction Mechanism}, enabling the model to autonomously recover from accumulated errors and preventing collapse. Furthermore, we engineered a full-stack inference acceleration suite incorporating hybrid sequence parallelism, Parallel VAE, and kernel-level optimizations. Extensive evaluations confirm that SoulX-FlashTalk is the first 14B-scale system to achieve a \textbf{sub-second start-up latency (0.87s)} while reaching a real-time throughput of \textbf{32 FPS}, setting a new standard for high-fidelity interactive digital human synthesis.

Dingcheng Zhen, Shunshun Yin, Shiyang Qin et al.

In this work, we introduce the first autoregressive framework for real-time, audio-driven portrait animation, a.k.a, talking head. Beyond the challenge of lengthy animation times, a critical challenge in realistic talking head generation lies in preserving the natural movement of diverse body parts. To this end, we propose Teller, the first streaming audio-driven protrait animation framework with autoregressive motion generation. Specifically, Teller first decomposes facial and body detail animation into two components: Facial Motion Latent Generation (FMLG) based on an autoregressive transfromer, and movement authenticity refinement using a Efficient Temporal Module (ETM).Concretely, FMLG employs a Residual VQ model to map the facial motion latent from the implicit keypoint-based model into discrete motion tokens, which are then temporally sliced with audio embeddings. This enables the AR tranformer to learn real-time, stream-based mappings from audio to motion. Furthermore, Teller incorporate ETM to capture finer motion details. This module ensures the physical consistency of body parts and accessories, such as neck muscles and earrings, improving the realism of these movements. Teller is designed to be efficient, surpassing the inference speed of diffusion-based models (Hallo 20.93s vs. Teller 0.92s for one second video generation), and achieves a real-time streaming performance of up to 25 FPS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms recent audio-driven portrait animation models, especially in small movements, as validated by human evaluations with a significant margin in quality and realism.

Mengling Xu, Ming Tao, Bing-Kun Bao

Cooking process visualization is a promising task in the intersection of image generation and food analysis, which aims to generate an image for each cooking step of a recipe. However, most existing works focus on generating images of finished foods based on the given recipes, and face two challenges to visualize the cooking process. First, the appearance of ingredients changes variously across cooking steps, it is difficult to generate the correct appearances of foods that match the textual description, leading to semantic inconsistency. Second, the current step might depend on the operations of previous step, it is crucial to maintain the contextual coherence of images in sequential order. In this work, we present a cooking process visualization model, called Chain-of-Cooking. Specifically, to generate correct appearances of ingredients, we present a Dynamic Patch Selection Module to retrieve previously generated image patches as references, which are most related to current textual contents. Furthermore, to enhance the coherence and keep the rational order of generated images, we propose a Semantic Evolution Module and a Bidirectional Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Guidance. To better utilize the semantics of previous texts, the Semantic Evolution Module establishes the semantical association between latent prompts and current cooking step, and merges it with the latent features. Then the CoT Guidance updates the merged features to guide the current cooking step remain coherent with the previous step. Moreover, we construct a dataset named CookViz, consisting of intermediate image-text pairs for the cooking process. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods in generating coherent and semantic consistent cooking process.

Dingcheng Zhen, Qian Qiao, Xu Zheng et al.

We introduce TransDiff, the first image generation model that marries Autoregressive (AR) Transformer with diffusion models. In this joint modeling framework, TransDiff encodes labels and images into high-level semantic features and employs a diffusion model to estimate the distribution of image samples. On the ImageNet 256x256 benchmark, TransDiff significantly outperforms other image generation models based on standalone AR Transformer or diffusion models. Specifically, TransDiff achieves a Frechet Inception Distance (FID) of 1.61 and an Inception Score (IS) of 293.4, and further provides x2 faster inference latency compared to state-of-the-art methods based on AR Transformer and x112 faster inference compared to diffusion-only models. Furthermore, building on the TransDiff model, we introduce a novel image generation paradigm called Multi-Reference Autoregression (MRAR), which performs autoregressive generation by predicting the next image. MRAR enables the model to reference multiple previously generated images, thereby facilitating the learning of more diverse representations and improving the quality of generated images in subsequent iterations. By applying MRAR, the performance of TransDiff is improved, with the FID reduced from 1.61 to 1.42. We expect TransDiff to open up a new frontier in the field of image generation.

Sifan Li, Ming Tao, Hao Zhao et al.

Text-to-Image (T2I) has been prevalent in recent years, with most common condition tasks having been optimized nicely. Besides, counterfactual Text-to-Image is obstructing us from a more versatile AIGC experience. For those scenes that are impossible to happen in real world and anti-physics, we should spare no efforts in increasing the factual feel, which means synthesizing images that people think very likely to be happening, and concept alignment, which means all the required objects should be in the same frame. In this paper, we focus on concept alignment. As controllable T2I models have achieved satisfactory performance for real applications, we utilize this technology to replace the objects in a synthesized image in latent space step-by-step to change the image from a common scene to a counterfactual scene to meet the prompt. We propose a strategy to instruct this replacing process, which is called as Explicit Logical Narrative Prompt (ELNP), by using the newly SoTA language model DeepSeek to generate the instructions. Furthermore, to evaluate models' performance in counterfactual T2I, we design a metric to calculate how many required concepts in the prompt can be covered averagely in the synthesized images. The extensive experiments and qualitative comparisons demonstrate that our strategy can boost the concept alignment in counterfactual T2I.

Ming Tao, Hao Tang, Fei Wu et al.

Synthesizing high-quality realistic images from text descriptions is a challenging task. Existing text-to-image Generative Adversarial Networks generally employ a stacked architecture as the backbone yet still remain three flaws. First, the stacked architecture introduces the entanglements between generators of different image scales. Second, existing studies prefer to apply and fix extra networks in adversarial learning for text-image semantic consistency, which limits the supervision capability of these networks. Third, the cross-modal attention-based text-image fusion that widely adopted by previous works is limited on several special image scales because of the computational cost. To these ends, we propose a simpler but more effective Deep Fusion Generative Adversarial Networks (DF-GAN). To be specific, we propose: (i) a novel one-stage text-to-image backbone that directly synthesizes high-resolution images without entanglements between different generators, (ii) a novel Target-Aware Discriminator composed of Matching-Aware Gradient Penalty and One-Way Output, which enhances the text-image semantic consistency without introducing extra networks, (iii) a novel deep text-image fusion block, which deepens the fusion process to make a full fusion between text and visual features. Compared with current state-of-the-art methods, our proposed DF-GAN is simpler but more efficient to synthesize realistic and text-matching images and achieves better performance on widely used datasets.

Xiaofeng Zhang, Feng Chen, Cailing Wang et al.

Different from image inpainting, image outpainting has relative less context in the image center to capture and more content at the image border to predict. Therefore, classical encoder-decoder pipeline of existing methods may not predict the outstretched unknown content perfectly. In this paper, a novel two-stage siamese adversarial model for image extrapolation, named Siamese Expansion Network (SiENet) is proposed. In two stages, a novel border sensitive convolution named adaptive filling convolution is designed for allowing encoder to predict the unknown content, alleviating the burden of decoder. Besides, to introduce prior knowledge to network and reinforce the inferring ability of encoder, siamese adversarial mechanism is designed to enable our network to model the distribution of covered long range feature for that of uncovered image feature. The results on four datasets has demonstrated that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-arts and could produce realistic results.