Pengpeng Liu

Boyong Wu, Chao Yan, Chen Hu et al.

This paper presents Step-Audio 2, an end-to-end multi-modal large language model designed for industry-strength audio understanding and speech conversation. By integrating a latent audio encoder and reasoning-centric reinforcement learning (RL), Step-Audio 2 achieves promising performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and audio understanding. To facilitate genuine end-to-end speech conversation, Step-Audio 2 incorporates the generation of discrete audio tokens into language modeling, significantly enhancing its responsiveness to paralinguistic information such as speaking styles and emotions. To effectively leverage the rich textual and acoustic knowledge in real-world data, Step-Audio 2 integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and is able to call external tools such as web search to mitigate hallucination and audio search to switch timbres. Trained on millions of hours of speech and audio data, Step-Audio 2 delivers intelligence and expressiveness across diverse conversational scenarios. Evaluation results demonstrate that Step-Audio 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on various audio understanding and conversational benchmarks compared to other open-source and commercial solutions. Please visit https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio2 for more information.

Tao Yu, Zerong Zheng, Kaiwen Guo et al.

Human volumetric capture is a long-standing topic in computer vision and computer graphics. Although high-quality results can be achieved using sophisticated off-line systems, real-time human volumetric capture of complex scenarios, especially using light-weight setups, remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a human volumetric capture method that combines temporal volumetric fusion and deep implicit functions. To achieve high-quality and temporal-continuous reconstruction, we propose dynamic sliding fusion to fuse neighboring depth observations together with topology consistency. Moreover, for detailed and complete surface generation, we propose detail-preserving deep implicit functions for RGBD input which can not only preserve the geometric details on the depth inputs but also generate more plausible texturing results. Results and experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods in terms of view sparsity, generalization capacity, reconstruction quality, and run-time efficiency.