Yu Zhou

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.

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.

Yan Shu, Hangui Lin, Yexin Liu et al.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved impressive progress in visual perception and reasoning. However, when confronted with visually ambiguous or non-semantic scene text, they often struggle to accurately spot and understand the content, frequently generating semantically plausible yet visually incorrect answers, which we refer to as semantic hallucination. In this work, we investigate the underlying causes of semantic hallucination and identify a key finding: Transformer layers in LLM with stronger attention focus on scene text regions are less prone to producing semantic hallucinations. Thus, we propose a training-free semantic hallucination mitigation framework comprising two key components: (1) ZoomText, a coarse-to-fine strategy that identifies potential text regions without external detectors; and (2) Grounded Layer Correction, which adaptively leverages the internal representations from layers less prone to hallucination to guide decoding, correcting hallucinated outputs for non-semantic samples while preserving the semantics of meaningful ones. To enable rigorous evaluation, we introduce TextHalu-Bench, a benchmark of 1,740 samples spanning both semantic and non-semantic cases, with manually curated question answer pairs designed to probe model hallucinations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only effectively mitigates semantic hallucination but also achieves strong performance on public benchmarks for scene text spotting and understanding.

Xugong Qin, Yu Zhou, Dayan Wu et al.

Recent scene text detection works mainly focus on curve text detection. However, in real applications, the curve texts are more scarce than the multi-oriented ones. Accurate detection of multi-oriented text with large variations of scales, orientations, and aspect ratios is of great significance. Among the multi-oriented detection methods, direct regression for the geometry of scene text shares a simple yet powerful pipeline and gets popular in academic and industrial communities, but it may produce imperfect detections, especially for long texts due to the limitation of the receptive field. In this work, we aim to improve this while keeping the pipeline simple. A fully convolutional corner refinement network (FC2RN) is proposed for accurate multi-oriented text detection, in which an initial corner prediction and a refined corner prediction are obtained at one pass. With a novel quadrilateral RoI convolution operation tailed for multi-oriented scene text, the initial quadrilateral prediction is encoded into the feature maps which can be further used to predict offset between the initial prediction and the ground-truth as well as output a refined confidence score. Experimental results on four public datasets including MSRA-TD500, ICDAR2017-RCTW, ICDAR2015, and COCO-Text demonstrate that FC2RN can outperform the state-of-the-art methods. The ablation study shows the effectiveness of corner refinement and scoring for accurate text localization.