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Cheng Gong

Publications and source records attributed to Cheng Gong.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

SAP: State-Guided Data Synthesis with Argument Provenance for Multi-Turn Tool Use

High-quality multi-turn tool-use data is essential for training agentic models, yet existing data synthesis methods often underrepresent the argument-level dependencies that are critical to long-horizon tool use. As a result, even when a model selects the correct tool, task execution may still fail because the model fills tool arguments with fabricated, stale, or weakly grounded values. To address this problem, we propose \textbf{State-Guided Data Synthesis with Argument Provenance (SAP)}. SAP combines state guidance, tool-argument provenance constraints, and turn-level validation to efficiently construct tool-use trajectories with long-range dependencies and high accuracy. Using data generated by SAP, we build SAP-4B, which is highly competitive even when compared with much larger models across multiple benchmarks. Source code, synthesized data, and trained weights are available at https://github.com/Zichen1024/SAP.

cs.AI

Towards Expressive and Faithful Audio-to-Image Generation: A Unified Multimodal Dataset and Synthesis Framework

As an important subfield of cross-modal generation, synthesizing static visual content in the form of images from audio, namely audio-to-image (A2I) generation, has attracted increasing research attention in recent years. Nevertheless, despite the remarkable visual quality of modern text-to-image (T2I) models, the performance of A2I remains fundamentally limited by traditional datasets, which often lack both high-fidelity images and precise cross-modal alignment. As a result, existing methods still struggle to achieve high-quality audio-to-image generation through finetuning strong T2I models, thereby constraining practical applications in this area. Motivated by this gap, we introduce A2I-Set, a unified, high-quality tri-modal dataset consisting of 323K paired audio, images, and detailed text captions, specifically designed for audio-visual research, including audio-conditioned image generation. Besides, we developed a new mixed-source test set for the A2I task through human supervision. We further propose an A2I model, AudioCanvas, fine-tuned on our A2I-Set. Experiments show that AudioCanvas achieves more visually expressive as well as cross-modal alignment results that generally outperforming existing approaches. Our dataset and source code are available at https://github.com/gdx012/A2I-Generation.

cs.CV

Boogu-Image-0.1: Boosting Open Agentic Multimodal Generation via Understanding under a Minimal Budget

We introduce Boogu-Image-0.1, an open-source unified multimodal understanding and generation model family, comprising Base, Turbo, Edit, and Edit-Turbo variants. It delivers competitive performance in high-quality text-to-image generation, fast inference, instruction-based editing, and bilingual (Chinese-English) text rendering. Closed-source multimodal systems like Nano-Banana-Pro and GPT-Image-2 achieve strong performance through system-level integration rather than a single model, yet their internal practices remain largely undisclosed. In this work, we demonstrate that strengthening the understanding capability of the system, through a stronger multimodal encoder, agentic prompt rewriting, and related techniques, together with improvements in data quality, training pipelines, and agentic inference-time scaling, can substantially enhance generation and editing performance even under highly constrained compute budgets. Comprehensive evaluations show that Boogu-Image-0.1 consistently matches or surpasses other open-source models across standard benchmarks, and achieves results approaching leading closed-source systems. Notably, this is accomplished with only 208.62 million unique images. The base model's theoretical training cost is only approximately \$400K. We share practical discussions that we believe are valuable to the broader research community, and release weights, code, and recipes under Apache 2.0 to advance the open ecosystem for unified multimodal understanding and generation. Our code is available here: https://github.com/Boogu-Project/Boogu-Image.

cs.CV

Learning from Mistakes: Rollout-Retrieval Lifelong Policy Learning for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving policies should be able to improve continually as deployment exposes them to increasingly diverse and long-tail traffic situations. However, most learning-based policies are trained or fine-tuned on expert demonstrations and then rely largely on generalization to handle challenging closed-loop scenarios, lacking an explicit mechanism to correct and retain the mistakes exposed in these scenarios. This paper studies autonomous driving policy improvement from a lifelong learning perspective: Can a pretrained policy improve continually by accumulating corrective knowledge derived from its own mistakes, while retaining previously acquired driving competence? To answer this question, we propose Rollout-Retrieval Lifelong Policy Learning (R$^2$LPL), a policy learning framework that retrieves corrective targets from recoverable policy-induced mistakes and retains the resulting knowledge through lifelong policy learning. R^2LPL addresses a key bottleneck in continual policy improvement: closed-loop mistakes reveal where the policy is weak, but do not directly specify what the policy should learn. By filtering recoverable mistake-related states and retrieving feasible corrective targets, R$^2$LPL turns sparse failure evidence into compact supervised knowledge for stable and sample-efficient policy improvement. We evaluate R$^2$LPL on large-scale closed-loop nuPlan benchmarks. With only a few rollout and continual-learning cycles, R$^2$LPL elevates a learning-based planner with moderate initial performance to state-of-the-art performance across the evaluated benchmarks, especially on the challenging and long-tail Test14-hard split. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of R$^2$LPL in converting recoverable closed-loop mistakes into corrective knowledge for sustained policy improvement.

cs.RO

Unified Audio Generation and Editing via Joint Condition Modeling and Progressive Training

With the growing focus on audio in multimedia applications, numerous advanced works on audio generation have emerged. Existing studies typically treat text-to-audio (TTA) and other related audio generation tasks, such as instruction-based audio editing, as independent challenges, adopting task-specific architectures or modules. This absence of a unified modeling paradigm substantially increases the overhead and complexity of building a system for both audio generation and editing, while also leading to limited scalability. To address this issue, we introduce AudioWeave, a unified model for TTA and audio editing without additional task-specific components. Specifically, we propose a joint condition modeling approach with a factorized position embedding, enabling the diffusion transformer backbone to operate under heterogeneous inputs of TTA and audio editing. We further propose a progressive multistage training strategy to mitigate task competition and catastrophic forgetting caused by interference among multiple tasks. This in turn helps maintain the performance of each individual task and may even lead to improvements in certain aspects. Experimental results on TTA task and six audio editing tasks show that our unified model achieves competitive performance with task-specific models, laying a groundwork for further exploration of unified audio generation models.

eess.AS

Audio Imitator: Controlling Timbre and Tempo in Video2Audio Synthesis with Audio Reference

Video-to-audio generation has made significant progress in achieving semantic consistency and temporal alignment from silent videos. However, audio contains rich stylistic attributes such as timbre and tempo that are difficult to infer from visual and textual inputs alone. While reference audio can serve as additional conditioning, it is typically treated as a holistic signal, limiting fine-grained style control. We propose AudioIM, an attribute-aware framework that explicitly models timbre and tempo as separate control factors rather than relying on holistic prompt conditioning. Dual encoders extract complementary timbre-related and tempo-related representations, which are injected through global conditioning. A masking-based training strategy enables effective latent prompt conditioning at inference. Experiments on VGGSound show improved style similarity while preserving semantic alignment and synchronization. Audio samples are available at: https://anonymousdemo757.github.io/.

eess.AS

Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts

Evaluating expressive speech remains challenging, as existing methods mainly assess emotional intensity and overlook whether a speech sample is expressively appropriate for its contextual setting. This limitation hinders reliable evaluation of speech systems used in narrative-driven and interactive applications, such as audiobooks and conversational agents. We introduce CEAEval, a Context-rich framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech, which assesses whether a speech sample expressively aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context. To support this task, we construct CEAEval-D, the first context-rich speech dataset with real human performances in Mandarin conversational speech, providing narrative descriptions together with fifteen dimensions of human annotations covering expressive attributes and expressive appropriateness. We further develop CEAEval-M, a model that integrates knowledge distillation, planner-based multi-model collaboration, adaptive audio attention bias, and reinforcement learning to perform context-rich expressive appropriateness evaluation. Experiments on a human-annotated test set demonstrate that CEAEval-M substantially outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems.

eess.AS

UniSonate: A Unified Model for Speech, Music, and Sound Effect Generation with Text Instructions

Generative audio modeling has largely been fragmented into specialized tasks, text-to-speech (TTS), text-to-music (TTM), and text-to-audio (TTA), each operating under heterogeneous control paradigms. Unifying these modalities remains a fundamental challenge due to the intrinsic dissonance between structured semantic representations (speech/music) and unstructured acoustic textures (sound effects). In this paper, we introduce UniSonate, a unified flow-matching framework capable of synthesizing speech, music, and sound effects through a standardized, reference-free natural language instruction interface. To reconcile structural disparities, we propose a novel dynamic token injection mechanism that projects unstructured environmental sounds into a structured temporal latent space, enabling precise duration control within a phoneme-driven Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT). Coupled with a multi-stage curriculum learning strategy, this approach effectively mitigates cross-modal optimization conflicts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniSonate achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction-based TTS (WER 1.47%) and TTM (SongEval Coherence 3.18), while maintaining competitive fidelity in TTA. Crucially, we observe positive transfer, where joint training on diverse audio data significantly enhances structural coherence and prosodic expressiveness compared to single-task baselines. Audio samples are available at https://qiangchunyu.github.io/UniSonate/.

eess.AS

Coexistence of ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity in the van der Waals multiferroic CuIn0.2V0.8P2S6

Two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) multiferroics have emerged as a promising platform for next-generation multifunctional devices. Although recent studies have demonstrated that artificial heterostructures can combine dual ferroic orders and exhibit strong magnetoelectric coupling, their performance is sometimes limited by poor interface quality and inadequate long-term stability. By contrast, the realization of intrinsic single-phase materials with coexisting ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity remains a longstanding challenge in the field. Here we report the realization of a single-phase 2D vdW multiferroic system, CuIn0.2V0.8P2S6, which exhibits both ferromagnetism and room-temperature ferroelectricity. The intrinsic ferroelectric nature of CuIn0.2V0.8P2S6 was probed using ferroelectric tunnel junctions, which exhibit a large tunneling electroresistance with an ON/OFF ratio of 107 at 295 K. CuIn0.2V0.8P2S6 develops ferromagnetic ordering with the Curie temperature (TC) of 14.6 K, as evidenced by pronounced magnetic hysteresis and a relatively large remanent magnetization. Notably, the appearance of a magnetodielectric response below TC is consistent with the anticipated interplay between the ferromagnetic and ferroelectric orders. These results highlight a promising route toward single-phase van der Waals multiferroics with coexisting ferroic orders.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci

CoVe: Training Interactive Tool-Use Agents via Constraint-Guided Verification

Developing multi-turn interactive tool-use agents is challenging because real-world user needs are often complex and ambiguous, yet agents must execute deterministic actions to satisfy them. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{CoVe} (\textbf{Co}nstraint-\textbf{Ve}rification), a post-training data synthesis framework designed for training interactive tool-use agents while ensuring both data complexity and correctness. CoVe begins by defining explicit task constraints, which serve a dual role: they guide the generation of complex trajectories and act as deterministic verifiers for assessing trajectory quality. This enables the creation of high-quality training trajectories for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and the derivation of accurate reward signals for reinforcement learning (RL). Our evaluation on the challenging $\tau^2$-bench benchmark demonstrates the effectiveness of the framework. Notably, our compact \textbf{CoVe-4B} model achieves success rates of 43.0\% and 59.4\% in the Airline and Retail domains, respectively; its overall performance significantly outperforms strong baselines of similar scale and remains competitive with models up to $17\times$ its size. These results indicate that CoVe provides an effective and efficient pathway for synthesizing training data for state-of-the-art interactive tool-use agents. To support future research, we open-source our code, trained model, and the full set of 12K high-quality trajectories used for training.

cs.AI

Topological and arithmetic characteristics about products of projective lines with complex tori

In this paper, we study non-planar degeneracies with cylindrical configurations. They could be constructed by the product $\mathbb{CP}^1 \times T$ of the projective plane and a complex torus with embedding $(m,n)$. We prove that their fundamental groups of Galois covers have an abelian subgroup of rank $m(2n-1)$ respectively, and the irregularity of these surfaces are at least $2mn-1$. Furthermore, we also use Chern numbers to compute the index of such surfaces and classify them.

math.AG

High-Fidelity Generative Audio Compression at 0.275kbps

High-fidelity general audio compression at ultra-low bitrates is crucial for applications ranging from low-bandwidth communication to generative audio-language modeling. Traditional audio compression methods and contemporary neural codecs are fundamentally designed for waveform reconstruction. As a result, when operating at ultra-low bitrates, these methods degrade rapidly and often fail to preserve essential information, leading to severe acoustic artifacts and pronounced semantic distortion. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Generative Audio Compression (GAC), a novel paradigm shift from signal fidelity to task-oriented effectiveness. Implemented within the AI Flow framework, GAC is theoretically grounded in the Law of Information Capacity. These foundations posit that abundant computational power can be leveraged at the receiver to offset extreme communication bottlenecks--exemplifying the More Computation, Less Bandwidth philosophy. By integrating semantic understanding at the transmitter with scalable generative synthesis at the receiver, GAC offloads the information burden to powerful model priors. Our 1.8B-parameter model achieves high-fidelity reconstruction of 32kHz general audio at an unprecedented bitrate of 0.275kbps. Even at 0.175kbps, it still preserves a strong intelligible audio transmission capability, which represents an about 3000x compression ratio, significantly outperforming current state-of-the-art neural codecs in maintaining both perceptual quality and semantic consistency.

eess.AS

Rare Word Recognition and Translation Without Fine-Tuning via Task Vector in Speech Models

Rare words remain a critical bottleneck for speech-to-text systems. While direct fine-tuning improves recognition of target words, it often incurs high cost, catastrophic forgetting, and limited scalability. To address these challenges, we propose a training-free paradigm based on task vectors for rare word recognition and translation. By defining task vectors as parameter differences and introducing word-level task vector arithmetic, our approach enables flexible composition of rare-word capabilities, greatly enhancing scalability and reusability. Extensive experiments across multiple domains show that the proposed method matches or surpasses fine-tuned models on target words, improves general performance by about 5 BLEU, and mitigates catastrophic forgetting.

eess.AS

InstructAudio: Unified speech and music generation with natural language instruction

Text-to-speech (TTS) and text-to-music (TTM) models face significant limitations in instruction-based control. TTS systems usually depend on reference audio for timbre, offer only limited text-level attribute control, and rarely support dialogue generation. TTM systems are constrained by input conditioning requirements that depend on expert knowledge annotations. The high heterogeneity of these input control conditions makes them difficult to joint modeling with speech synthesis. Despite sharing common acoustic modeling characteristics, these two tasks have long been developed independently, leaving open the challenge of achieving unified modeling through natural language instructions. We introduce InstructAudio, a unified framework that enables instruction-based (natural language descriptions) control of acoustic attributes including timbre (gender, age), paralinguistic (emotion, style, accent), and musical (genre, instrument, rhythm, atmosphere). It supports expressive speech, music, and dialogue generation in English and Chinese. The model employs joint and single diffusion transformer layers with a standardized instruction-phoneme input format, trained on 50K hours of speech and 20K hours of music data, enabling multi-task learning and cross-modal alignment. Fig. 1 visualizes performance comparisons with mainstream TTS and TTM models, demonstrating that InstructAudio achieves optimal results on most metrics. To our best knowledge, InstructAudio represents the first instruction-controlled framework unifying speech and music generation. Audio samples are available at: https://qiangchunyu.github.io/InstructAudio/

eess.AS

Efficient Reasoning via Reward Model

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been shown to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), enabling the development of large reasoning models (LRMs). However, LRMs such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI o1 often generate verbose responses containing redundant or irrelevant reasoning step-a phenomenon known as overthinking-which substantially increases computational costs. Prior efforts to mitigate this issue commonly incorporate length penalties into the reward function, but we find they frequently suffer from two critical issues: length collapse and training collapse, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address them, we propose a pipeline for training a Conciseness Reward Model (CRM) that scores the conciseness of reasoning path. Additionally, we introduce a novel reward formulation named Conciseness Reward Function (CRF) with explicit dependency between the outcome reward and conciseness score, thereby fostering both more effective and more efficient reasoning. From a theoretical standpoint, we demonstrate the superiority of the new reward from the perspective of variance reduction and improved convergence properties. Besides, on the practical side, extensive experiments on five mathematical benchmark datasets demonstrate the method's effectiveness and token efficiency, which achieves an 8.1% accuracy improvement and a 19.9% reduction in response token length on Qwen2.5-7B. Furthermore, the method generalizes well to other LLMs including Llama and Mistral. The implementation code and datasets are publicly available for reproduction: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CRM.

cs.AI

Perturbation Self-Supervised Representations for Cross-Lingual Emotion TTS: Stage-Wise Modeling of Emotion and Speaker

Cross-lingual emotional text-to-speech (TTS) aims to produce speech in one language that captures the emotion of a speaker from another language while maintaining the target voice's timbre. This process of cross-lingual emotional speech synthesis presents a complex challenge, necessitating flexible control over emotion, timbre, and language. However, emotion and timbre are highly entangled in speech signals, making fine-grained control challenging. To address this issue, we propose EMM-TTS, a novel two-stage cross-lingual emotional speech synthesis framework based on perturbed self-supervised learning (SSL) representations. In the first stage, the model explicitly and implicitly encodes prosodic cues to capture emotional expressiveness, while the second stage restores the timbre from perturbed SSL representations. We further investigate the effect of different speaker perturbation strategies-formant shifting and speaker anonymization-on the disentanglement of emotion and timbre. To strengthen speaker preservation and expressive control, we introduce Speaker Consistency Loss (SCL) and Speaker-Emotion Adaptive Layer Normalization (SEALN) modules. Additionally, we find that incorporating explicit acoustic features (e.g., F0, energy, and duration) alongside pretrained latent features improves voice cloning performance. Comprehensive multi-metric evaluations, including both subjective and objective measures, demonstrate that EMM-TTS achieves superior naturalness, emotion transferability, and timbre consistency across languages.

cs.SD

Word-Level Emotional Expression Control in Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Synthesis

While emotional text-to-speech (TTS) has made significant progress, most existing research remains limited to utterance-level emotional expression and fails to support word-level control. Achieving word-level expressive control poses fundamental challenges, primarily due to the complexity of modeling multi-emotion transitions and the scarcity of annotated datasets that capture intra-sentence emotional and prosodic variation. In this paper, we propose WeSCon, the first self-training framework that enables word-level control of both emotion and speaking rate in a pretrained zero-shot TTS model, without relying on datasets containing intra-sentence emotion or speed transitions. Our method introduces a transition-smoothing strategy and a dynamic speed control mechanism to guide the pretrained TTS model in performing word-level expressive synthesis through a multi-round inference process. To further simplify the inference, we incorporate a dynamic emotional attention bias mechanism and fine-tune the model via self-training, thereby activating its ability for word-level expressive control in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results show that WeSCon effectively overcomes data scarcity, achieving state-of-the-art performance in word-level emotional expression control while preserving the strong zero-shot synthesis capabilities of the original TTS model.

eess.AS

The regularity of monomial ideals and their integral closures

Let $I$ be a monomial ideal in a polynomial ring $S=K[x_1,\ldots,x_n]$ over a field $K$ with $n=2$ or $3$, and let $\overline{I}$ be its integral closure. We will show that $\text{reg} (\overline{I}) \le \text{reg} (I)$. Furthermore, if $I$ is generated by elements of degree $d$, then $\text{reg} (I)=d$ if and only if $I$ has linear quotients.

math.AC