Qing Wang

Qing Wang, Zehan Li, Hang Lv et al.

Human communication involves more than explicit semantics, with implicit signals and contextual cues playing a critical role in shaping meaning. However, modern speech technologies, such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) often fail to capture these beyond-semantic dimensions. To better characterize and benchmark the progression of speech intelligence, we introduce Spoken Interaction System Capability Levels (L1-L5), a hierarchical framework illustrated the evolution of spoken dialogue systems from basic command recognition to human-like social interaction. To support these advanced capabilities, we propose Beyond-Semantic Speech (BoSS), which refers to the set of information in speech communication that encompasses but transcends explicit semantics. It conveys emotions, contexts, and modifies or extends meanings through multidimensional features such as affective cues, contextual dynamics, and implicit semantics, thereby enhancing the understanding of communicative intentions and scenarios. We present a formalized framework for BoSS, leveraging cognitive relevance theories and machine learning models to analyze temporal and contextual speech dynamics. We evaluate BoSS-related attributes across five different dimensions, reveals that current spoken language models (SLMs) are hard to fully interpret beyond-semantic signals. These findings highlight the need for advancing BoSS research to enable richer, more context-aware human-machine communication.

Qing Wang, Xiaohang Yang, Yilan Dong et al.

Music-to-dance generation aims to synthesize human dance motion conditioned on musical input. Despite recent progress, significant challenges remain due to the semantic gap between music and dance motion, as music offers only abstract cues, such as melody, groove, and emotion, without explicitly specifying the physical movements. Moreover, a single piece of music can produce multiple plausible dance interpretations. This one-to-many mapping demands additional guidance, as music alone provides limited information for generating diverse dance movements. The challenge is further amplified by the scarcity of paired music and dance data, which restricts the modelâĂŹs ability to learn diverse dance patterns. In this paper, we introduce DanceChat, a Large Language Model (LLM)-guided music-to-dance generation approach. We use an LLM as a choreographer that provides textual motion instructions, offering explicit, high-level guidance for dance generation. This approach goes beyond implicit learning from music alone, enabling the model to generate dance that is both more diverse and better aligned with musical styles. Our approach consists of three components: (1) an LLM-based pseudo instruction generation module that produces textual dance guidance based on music style and structure, (2) a multi-modal feature extraction and fusion module that integrates music, rhythm, and textual guidance into a shared representation, and (3) a diffusion-based motion synthesis module together with a multi-modal alignment loss, which ensures that the generated dance is aligned with both musical and textual cues. Extensive experiments on AIST++ and human evaluations show that DanceChat outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.