Qifan Liang

Qifan Liang, Yuansen Liu, Ruixin Wei et al.

While controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS) has achieved notable progress, most existing methods remain limited to inter-utterance-level control, making fine-grained intra-utterance expression challenging due to their reliance on non-public datasets or complex multi-stage training. In this paper, we propose TED-TTS, a training-free controllable framework for pretrained zero-shot TTS to enable intra-utterance emotion and duration expression. Specifically, we propose a segment-aware emotion conditioning strategy that combines causal masking with monotonic stream alignment filtering to isolate emotion conditioning and schedule mask transitions, enabling smooth intra-utterance emotion shifts while preserving global semantic coherence. Based on this, we further propose a segment-aware duration steering strategy to combine local duration embedding steering with global EOS logit modulation, allowing local duration adjustment while ensuring globally consistent termination. To eliminate the need for segment-level manual prompt engineering, we construct a 30,000-sample multi-emotion and duration-annotated text dataset to enable LLM-based automatic prompt construction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our training-free method not only achieves state-of-the-art intra-utterance consistency in multi-emotion and duration control, but also maintains baseline-level speech quality of the underlying TTS model. Code and audio samples are available.

Yixiang Shan, Zhengbang Zhu, Ting Long et al.

The performance of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is sensitive to the proportion of high-return trajectories in the offline dataset. However, in many simulation environments and real-world scenarios, there are large ratios of low-return trajectories rather than high-return trajectories, which makes learning an efficient policy challenging. In this paper, we propose a method called Contrastive Diffuser (CDiffuser) to make full use of low-return trajectories and improve the performance of offline RL algorithms. Specifically, CDiffuser groups the states of trajectories in the offline dataset into high-return states and low-return states and treats them as positive and negative samples correspondingly. Then, it designs a contrastive mechanism to pull the trajectory of an agent toward high-return states and push them away from low-return states. Through the contrast mechanism, trajectories with low returns can serve as negative examples for policy learning, guiding the agent to avoid areas associated with low returns and achieve better performance. Experiments on 14 commonly used D4RL benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CDiffuser}.

Junchuan Zhao, Qifan Liang, Ye Wang

Co-speech gesture generation aims to synthesize realistic body movements that are semantically coherent with speech and faithful to a user-specified gestural style. Existing VQ-VAE based co-speech gesture generation methods improve generation quality but fail to encode semantic structure into the motion representation or explicitly disentangle content from style, limiting both semantic coherence and personalization fidelity. We present PersonaGest, a two-stage framework addressing both limitations. In the first stage, a semantic-guided RVQ-VAE disentangles motion content and gestural style within the residual quantization structure, where a Semantic-Aware Motion Codebook (SMoC) organizes the content codebook by gesture semantics and contrastive learning further enforces content-style separation. In the second stage, a Masked Generative Transformer generates content tokens via a semantic-aware re-masking strategy, followed by a cascade of Style Residual Transformers conditioned on a reference motion prompt for style control. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on objective metrics and perceptual user studies, with strong style consistency to the reference prompt. Our project page with demo videos is available at https://danny-nus.github.io/PersonaGest/

Qifan Liang, Junlin Li, Zhen Han et al.

Electrocautery or lasers will inevitably generate surgical smoke, which hinders the visual guidance of laparoscopic videos for surgical procedures. The surgical smoke can be classified into different types based on its motion patterns, leading to distinctive spatio-temporal characteristics across smoky laparoscopic videos. However, existing desmoking methods fail to account for such smoke-type-specific distinctions. Therefore, we propose the first Smoke-Type-Aware Laparoscopic Video Desmoking Network (STANet) by introducing two smoke types: Diffusion Smoke and Ambient Smoke. Specifically, a smoke mask segmentation sub-network is designed to jointly conduct smoke mask and smoke type predictions based on the attention-weighted mask aggregation, while a smokeless video reconstruction sub-network is proposed to perform specially desmoking on smoky features guided by two types of smoke mask. To address the entanglement challenges of two smoke types, we further embed a coarse-to-fine disentanglement module into the mask segmentation sub-network, which yields more accurate disentangled masks through the smoke-type-aware cross attention between non-entangled and entangled regions. In addition, we also construct the first large-scale synthetic video desmoking dataset with smoke type annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in quality evaluations, but also exhibits superior generalization across multiple downstream surgical tasks.

Lu Guo, Yixiang Shan, Zhengbang Zhu et al.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables agents to learn policies from fixed datasets, avoiding costly or unsafe environment interactions. However, its effectiveness is often limited by dataset sparsity and the lack of transition overlap between suboptimal and expert trajectories, which makes long-horizon planning particularly challenging. Prior solutions based on synthetic data augmentation or trajectory stitching often fail to generalize to novel states and rely on heuristic stitching points. To address these challenges, we propose Retrieval High-quAlity Demonstrations (RAD) for decision-making, which combines non-parametric retrieval with diffusion-based generative modeling. RAD dynamically retrieves high-return states from the offline dataset as target states based on state similarity and return estimation, and plans toward them using a condition-guided diffusion model. Such retrieval-guided generation enables flexible trajectory stitching and improves generalization when encountered with underrepresented or out-of-distribution states. Extensive experiments confirm that RAD achieves competitive or superior performance compared to baselines across diverse benchmarks, validating its effectiveness.