Zhiyong Wu

Xianhao Wei, Jia Jia, Xiang Li et al.

This paper explores predicting suitable prosodic features for fine-grained emotion analysis from the discourse-level text. To obtain fine-grained emotional prosodic features as predictive values for our model, we extract a phoneme-level Local Prosody Embedding sequence (LPEs) and a Global Style Embedding as prosodic speech features from the speech with the help of a style transfer model. We propose a Discourse-level Multi-scale text Prosodic Model (D-MPM) that exploits multi-scale text to predict these two prosodic features. The proposed model can be used to analyze better emotional prosodic features and thus guide the speech synthesis model to synthesize more expressive speech. To quantitatively evaluate the proposed model, we contribute a new and large-scale Discourse-level Chinese Audiobook (DCA) dataset with more than 13,000 utterances annotated sequences to evaluate the proposed model. Experimental results on the DCA dataset show that the multi-scale text information effectively helps to predict prosodic features, and the discourse-level text improves both the overall coherence and the user experience. More interestingly, although we aim at the synthesis effect of the style transfer model, the synthesized speech by the proposed text prosodic analysis model is even better than the style transfer from the original speech in some user evaluation indicators.

Liyang Chen, Tianxiang Ma, Jiawei Liu et al.

Human-Centric Video Generation (HCVG) methods seek to synthesize human videos from multimodal inputs, including text, image, and audio. Existing methods struggle to effectively coordinate these heterogeneous modalities due to two challenges: the scarcity of training data with paired triplet conditions and the difficulty of collaborating the sub-tasks of subject preservation and audio-visual sync with multimodal inputs. In this work, we present HuMo, a unified HCVG framework for collaborative multimodal control. For the first challenge, we construct a high-quality dataset with diverse and paired text, reference images, and audio. For the second challenge, we propose a two-stage progressive multimodal training paradigm with task-specific strategies. For the subject preservation task, to maintain the prompt following and visual generation abilities of the foundation model, we adopt the minimal-invasive image injection strategy. For the audio-visual sync task, besides the commonly adopted audio cross-attention layer, we propose a focus-by-predicting strategy that implicitly guides the model to associate audio with facial regions. For joint learning of controllabilities across multimodal inputs, building on previously acquired capabilities, we progressively incorporate the audio-visual sync task. During inference, for flexible and fine-grained multimodal control, we design a time-adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance strategy that dynamically adjusts guidance weights across denoising steps. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HuMo surpasses specialized state-of-the-art methods in sub-tasks, establishing a unified framework for collaborative multimodal-conditioned HCVG. Project Page: https://phantom-video.github.io/HuMo.

Fengjin Li, Jie Wang, Yadong Niu et al.

Voice Conversion (VC) modifies speech to match a target speaker while preserving linguistic content. Traditional methods usually extract speaker information directly from speech while neglecting the explicit utilization of linguistic content. Since VC fundamentally involves disentangling speaker identity from linguistic content, leveraging structured semantic features could enhance conversion performance. However, previous attempts to incorporate semantic features into VC have shown limited effectiveness, motivating the integration of explicit text modeling. We propose StarVC, a unified autoregressive VC framework that first predicts text tokens before synthesizing acoustic features. The experiments demonstrate that StarVC outperforms conventional VC methods in preserving both linguistic content (i.e., WER and CER) and speaker characteristics (i.e., SECS and MOS). Audio demo can be found at: https://thuhcsi.github.io/StarVC/.

Xueyuan Chen, Dongchao Yang, Dingdong Wang et al.

Dysarthric speech reconstruction (DSR) aims to transform dysarthric speech into normal speech. It still suffers from low speaker similarity and poor prosody naturalness. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal DSR model by leveraging neural codec language modeling to improve the reconstruction results, especially for the speaker similarity and prosody naturalness. Our proposed model consists of: (i) a multi-modal content encoder to extract robust phoneme embeddings from dysarthric speech with auxiliary visual inputs; (ii) a speaker codec encoder to extract and normalize the speaker-aware codecs from the dysarthric speech, in order to provide original timbre and normal prosody; (iii) a codec language model based speech decoder to reconstruct the speech based on the extracted phoneme embeddings and normalized codecs. Evaluations on the commonly used UASpeech corpus show that our proposed model can achieve significant improvements in terms of speaker similarity and prosody naturalness.