Aakash Garg

Rohan Chaudhury, Mihir Godbole, Aakash Garg et al.

Contemporary conversational systems often present a significant limitation: their responses lack the emotional depth and disfluent characteristic of human interactions. This absence becomes particularly noticeable when users seek more personalized and empathetic interactions. Consequently, this makes them seem mechanical and less relatable to human users. Recognizing this gap, we embarked on a journey to humanize machine communication, to ensure AI systems not only comprehend but also resonate. To address this shortcoming, we have designed an innovative speech synthesis pipeline. Within this framework, a cutting-edge language model introduces both human-like emotion and disfluencies in a zero-shot setting. These intricacies are seamlessly integrated into the generated text by the language model during text generation, allowing the system to mirror human speech patterns better, promoting more intuitive and natural user interactions. These generated elements are then adeptly transformed into corresponding speech patterns and emotive sounds using a rule-based approach during the text-to-speech phase. Based on our experiments, our novel system produces synthesized speech that's almost indistinguishable from genuine human communication, making each interaction feel more personal and authentic.

Aakash Garg, Libing Zeng, Andrii Tsarov et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel diffusion-based approach to generate stereo images given a text prompt. Since stereo image datasets with large baselines are scarce, training a diffusion model from scratch is not feasible. Therefore, we propose leveraging the strong priors learned by Stable Diffusion and fine-tuning it on stereo image datasets to adapt it to the task of stereo generation. To improve stereo consistency and text-to-image alignment, we further tune the model using prompt alignment and our proposed stereo consistency reward functions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in generating high-quality stereo images across diverse scenarios, outperforming existing methods.

Shivam Rustagi, Aakash Garg, Pranay Raj Anand et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel touchless typing interface that makes use of an on-screen QWERTY keyboard and a smartphone camera. The keyboard was divided into nine color-coded clusters. The user moved their head toward clusters, which contained the letters that they wanted to type. A front-facing smartphone camera recorded the head movements. A bidirectional GRU based model which used pre-trained embedding rich in head pose features was employed to translate the recordings into cluster sequences. The model achieved an accuracy of 96.78% and 86.81% under intra- and inter-user scenarios, respectively, over a dataset of 2234 video sequences collected from 22 users.