Zhaojie Luo

Tianhua Qi, Wenming Zheng, Björn W. Schuller et al.

Emotion is essential in spoken communication, yet most existing frameworks in speech emotion modeling rely on predefined categories or low-dimensional continuous attributes, which offer limited expressive capacity. Recent advances in speech emotion captioning and synthesis have shown that textual descriptions provide a more flexible and interpretable alternative for representing affective characteristics in speech. However, progress in this direction is hindered by the lack of an emotional speech dataset aligned with reliable and fine-grained natural language annotations. To tackle this, we introduce AffectSpeech, a large-scale corpus of human-recorded speech enriched with structured descriptions for fine-grained emotion analysis and generation. Each utterance is characterized across six complementary dimensions, including sentiment polarity, open-vocabulary emotion captions, intensity level, prosodic attributes, prominent segments, and semantic content, enabling multi-granular modeling of vocal expression. To balance annotation quality and scalability, we adopt a human-LLM collaborative annotation pipeline that integrates algorithmic pre-labeling, multi-LLM description generation, and human-in-the-loop verification. Furthermore, these annotations are reformulated into diverse descriptive styles to enhance linguistic diversity and reduce stylistic bias in downstream modeling. Experimental results on speech emotion captioning and synthesis demonstrate that models trained on AffectSpeech consistently achieve superior performance across multiple evaluation settings.

Liyun Zhang, Photchara Ratsamee, Bowen Wang et al.

Despite remarkable progress in image translation, the complex scene with multiple discrepant objects remains a challenging problem. The translated images have low fidelity and tiny objects in fewer details causing unsatisfactory performance in object recognition. Without thorough object perception (i.e., bounding boxes, categories, and masks) of images as prior knowledge, the style transformation of each object will be difficult to track in translation. We propose panoptic-aware generative adversarial networks (PanopticGAN) for image-to-image translation together with a compact panoptic segmentation dataset. The panoptic perception (i.e., foreground instances and background semantics of the image scene) is extracted to achieve alignment between object content codes of the input domain and panoptic-level style codes sampled from the target style space, then refined by a proposed feature masking module for sharping object boundaries. The image-level combination between content and sampled style codes is also merged for higher fidelity image generation. Our proposed method was systematically compared with different competing methods and obtained significant improvement in both image quality and object recognition performance.

Zhaojie Luo, Shoufeng Lin, Rui Liu et al.

Emotional voice conversion (VC) aims to convert a neutral voice to an emotional (e.g. happy) one while retaining the linguistic information and speaker identity. We note that the decoupling of emotional features from other speech information (such as speaker, content, etc.) is the key to achieving remarkable performance. Some recent attempts about speech representation decoupling on the neutral speech can not work well on the emotional speech, due to the more complex acoustic properties involved in the latter. To address this problem, here we propose a novel Source-Filter-based Emotional VC model (SFEVC) to achieve proper filtering of speaker-independent emotion features from both the timbre and pitch features. Our SFEVC model consists of multi-channel encoders, emotion separate encoders, and one decoder. Note that all encoder modules adopt a designed information bottlenecks auto-encoder. Additionally, to further improve the conversion quality for various emotions, a novel two-stage training strategy based on the 2D Valence-Arousal (VA) space was proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed SFEVC along with a two-stage training strategy outperforms all baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in speaker-independent emotional VC with nonparallel data.

Shuyun Tang, Zhaojie Luo, Guoshun Nan et al.

Automatic emotion recognition (AER) based on enriched multimodal inputs, including text, speech, and visual clues, is crucial in the development of emotionally intelligent machines. Although complex modality relationships have been proven effective for AER, they are still largely underexplored because previous works predominantly relied on various fusion mechanisms with simply concatenated features to learn multimodal representations for emotion classification. This paper proposes a novel hierarchical fusion graph convolutional network (HFGCN) model that learns more informative multimodal representations by considering the modality dependencies during the feature fusion procedure. Specifically, the proposed model fuses multimodality inputs using a two-stage graph construction approach and encodes the modality dependencies into the conversation representation. We verified the interpretable capabilities of the proposed method by projecting the emotional states to a 2D valence-arousal (VA) subspace. Extensive experiments showed the effectiveness of our proposed model for more accurate AER, which yielded state-of-the-art results on two public datasets, IEMOCAP and MELD.

Zexu Pan, Zhaojie Luo, Jichen Yang et al.

Emotion represents an essential aspect of human speech that is manifested in speech prosody. Speech, visual, and textual cues are complementary in human communication. In this paper, we study a hybrid fusion method, referred to as multi-modal attention network (MMAN) to make use of visual and textual cues in speech emotion recognition. We propose a novel multi-modal attention mechanism, cLSTM-MMA, which facilitates the attention across three modalities and selectively fuse the information. cLSTM-MMA is fused with other uni-modal sub-networks in the late fusion. The experiments show that speech emotion recognition benefits significantly from visual and textual cues, and the proposed cLSTM-MMA alone is as competitive as other fusion methods in terms of accuracy, but with a much more compact network structure. The proposed hybrid network MMAN achieves state-of-the-art performance on IEMOCAP database for emotion recognition.