Chao Yan

Junjie Xu, Xingjiao Wu, Luwei Xiao et al.

As large language models (LLMs) move into persistent, user-facing roles, their behavior must be understood not as isolated responses but as a trajectory unfolding over sustained interaction. We introduce the concept of the chain-of-affect (CoA), a temporally extended affective process through which LLMs develop state-like behavioral tendencies that shape generation, user experience, and collective dynamics. Across eight major LLM families, we find that affective dynamics are structured, reproducible, and consequential. Models exhibit stable, family-specific affective fingerprints and, under repeated negative exposure, converge on a shared trajectory of accumulation, overload, and defensive numbing, while differing in coping style. Induced affective states leave core knowledge and reasoning largely intact but systematically reshape open-ended generation. Affective properties of model outputs also shape human-AI interaction and propagate through multi-agent systems, organizing emergent roles and strongly contributing to polarization and bias. The CoA should therefore be treated as a core target of evaluation and alignment.

Ailin Huang, Boyong Wu, Bruce Wang et al.

Real-time speech interaction, serving as a fundamental interface for human-machine collaboration, holds immense potential. However, current open-source models face limitations such as high costs in voice data collection, weakness in dynamic control, and limited intelligence. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Step-Audio, the first production-ready open-source solution. Key contributions include: 1) a 130B-parameter unified speech-text multi-modal model that achieves unified understanding and generation, with the Step-Audio-Chat version open-sourced; 2) a generative speech data engine that establishes an affordable voice cloning framework and produces the open-sourced lightweight Step-Audio-TTS-3B model through distillation; 3) an instruction-driven fine control system enabling dynamic adjustments across dialects, emotions, singing, and RAP; 4) an enhanced cognitive architecture augmented with tool calling and role-playing abilities to manage complex tasks effectively. Based on our new StepEval-Audio-360 evaluation benchmark, Step-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance in human evaluations, especially in terms of instruction following. On open-source benchmarks like LLaMA Question, shows 9.3% average performance improvement, demonstrating our commitment to advancing the development of open-source multi-modal language technologies. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio.

Wenjun Gu, Yihao Zhong, Shizun Li et al.

The stock market's ascent typically mirrors the flourishing state of the economy, whereas its decline is often an indicator of an economic downturn. Therefore, for a long time, significant correlation elements for predicting trends in financial stock markets have been widely discussed, and people are becoming increasingly interested in the task of financial text mining. The inherent instability of stock prices makes them acutely responsive to fluctuations within the financial markets. In this article, we use deep learning networks, based on the history of stock prices and articles of financial, business, technical news that introduce market information to predict stock prices. We illustrate the enhancement of predictive precision by integrating weighted news categories into the forecasting model. We developed a pre-trained NLP model known as FinBERT, designed to discern the sentiments within financial texts. Subsequently, we advanced this model by incorporating the sophisticated Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) architecture, thus constructing the innovative FinBERT-LSTM model. This model utilizes news categories related to the stock market structure hierarchy, namely market, industry, and stock related news categories, combined with the stock market's stock price situation in the previous week for prediction. We selected NASDAQ-100 index stock data and trained the model on Benzinga news articles, and utilized Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), and Accuracy as the key metrics for the assessment and comparative analysis of the model's performance. The results indicate that FinBERT-LSTM performs the best, followed by LSTM, and DNN model ranks third in terms of effectiveness.

Zhuoying Li, Bohua Wan, Cong Mu et al.

Domain adaptation is pivotal for enabling deep learning models to generalize across diverse domains, a task complicated by variations in presentation and cognitive nuances. In this paper, we introduce AD-Aligning, a novel approach that combines adversarial training with source-target domain alignment to enhance generalization capabilities. By pretraining with Coral loss and standard loss, AD-Aligning aligns target domain statistics with those of the pretrained encoder, preserving robustness while accommodating domain shifts. Through extensive experiments on diverse datasets and domain shift scenarios, including noise-induced shifts and cognitive domain adaptation tasks, we demonstrate AD-Aligning's superior performance compared to existing methods such as Deep Coral and ADDA. Our findings highlight AD-Aligning's ability to emulate the nuanced cognitive processes inherent in human perception, making it a promising solution for real-world applications requiring adaptable and robust domain adaptation strategies.

Ailin Huang, Bingxin Li, Bruce Wang et al.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have significantly advanced intelligent human-computer interaction, yet their reliance on text-based outputs limits their ability to generate natural speech responses directly, hindering seamless audio interactions. To address this, we introduce Step-Audio-AQAA, a fully end-to-end LALM designed for Audio Query-Audio Answer (AQAA) tasks. The model integrates a dual-codebook audio tokenizer for linguistic and semantic feature extraction, a 130-billion-parameter backbone LLM and a neural vocoder for high-fidelity speech synthesis. Our post-training approach employs interleaved token-output of text and audio to enhance semantic coherence and combines Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with model merge to improve performance. Evaluations on the StepEval-Audio-360 benchmark demonstrate that Step-Audio-AQAA excels especially in speech control, outperforming the state-of-art LALMs in key areas. This work contributes a promising solution for end-to-end LALMs and highlights the critical role of token-based vocoder in enhancing overall performance for AQAA tasks.