Huan Zhao

Yuang Li, Xiaosong Qiao, Xiaofeng Zhao et al.

Large language models can enhance automatic speech recognition systems through generative error correction. In this paper, we propose Pinyin-enhanced GEC, which leverages Pinyi, the phonetic representation of Mandarin Chinese, as supplementary information to improve Chinese ASR error correction. Our approach only utilizes synthetic errors for training and employs the one-best hypothesis during inference. Additionally, we introduce a multitask training approach involving conversion tasks between Pinyin and text to align their feature spaces. Experiments on the Aishell-1 and the Common Voice datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms GEC with text-only input. More importantly, we provide intuitive explanations for the effectiveness of PY-GEC and multitask training from two aspects: 1) increased attention weight on Pinyin features; and 2) aligned feature space between Pinyin and text hidden states.

Bin Wang, Yang Xu, Huan Zhao et al.

Speech-driven 3D talking head generation aims to produce lifelike facial animations precisely synchronized with speech. While considerable progress has been made in achieving high lip-synchronization accuracy, existing methods largely overlook the intricate nuances of individual speaking styles, which limits personalization and realism. In this work, we present a novel framework for personalized 3D talking head animation, namely "PTalker". This framework preserves speaking style through style disentanglement from audio and facial motion sequences and enhances lip-synchronization accuracy through a three-level alignment mechanism between audio and mesh modalities. Specifically, to effectively disentangle style and content, we design disentanglement constraints that encode driven audio and motion sequences into distinct style and content spaces to enhance speaking style representation. To improve lip-synchronization accuracy, we adopt a modality alignment mechanism incorporating three aspects: spatial alignment using Graph Attention Networks to capture vertex connectivity in the 3D mesh structure, temporal alignment using cross-attention to capture and synchronize temporal dependencies, and feature alignment by top-k bidirectional contrastive losses and KL divergence constraints to ensure consistency between speech and mesh modalities. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on public datasets demonstrate that PTalker effectively generates realistic, stylized 3D talking heads that accurately match identity-specific speaking styles, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. The source code and supplementary videos are available at: PTalker.