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Junyu Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Junyu Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Lip-Focused Audio-Visual Consistency Detects Speech Content Manipulation beyond Coarse Synchronization

Speech-content manipulation changes what a visible person appears to say by replacing the speech track and, in stronger attacks, regenerating mouth motion to match the forged utterance. Such attacks are difficult to expose with texture artifacts or coarse lip-sync scores because modern retalking models explicitly optimize audio-visual synchrony. We test the narrower hypothesis that speech replacement still perturbs the local relationship between acoustic dynamics and mouth motion after speaker identity or coarse synchrony is controlled. To isolate this signal, we introduce SyncSpeech, an LRS3-derived benchmark containing real videos, audio-splicing cheapfakes and Wav2Lip retalking attacks under same-speaker and different-speaker replacement. We then introduce C-MIND, a lip-focused detector that aligns audio and mouth-motion representations at frame level and models their agreement and disagreement without transcripts, automatic speech recognition features or an unmanipulated reference. On SyncSpeech, pretrained SyncLip-C achieves 95.813% scenario-averaged accuracy and 0.9943 AUC, outperforming sentence-level fusion, full-face inputs and a reproduced SyncNet baseline under the reported protocol. When trained on the corresponding FakeAVCeleb training split, C-MIND correctly classifies 278 of 280 samples in the selected unseen-speaker test subset, whereas accuracy falls to 82.775% on unseen Video-Retalking attacks. These results identify lip-focused speech-articulation consistency as a useful but generator-sensitive forensic signal within the evaluated settings.

eess.AS↗

YingLan: A Multimodal Ocean Foundation Model for Unified Representation Learning from Heterogeneous Observations

Multimodal ocean modeling remains challenging due to substantial heterogeneity in data structures, physical semantics, and spatiotemporal characteristics across satellite imagery, gridded oceanographic fields, and buoy observations. Existing approaches largely focus on task-specific ocean modeling, while learning transferable representations from heterogeneous observations remains an open problem. To address this challenge, we propose YingLan, a multimodal ocean foundation model that integrates physics-attribute-conditioned dynamic encoding, Spatiotemporal Increment Coupling (STIC), and ocean-state evolution-aware pretraining. Specifically, the dynamic encoding mechanism generates adaptive input projections conditioned on physical semantics and observation characteristics, enabling flexible representation of heterogeneous ocean variables. STIC models multiscale spatiotemporal dependencies through cross-scale interactions of latent temporal increments. The pretraining strategy further combines masked observation reconstruction with temporal evolution objectives to facilitate the learning of coherent ocean-state representations across different prediction horizons. YingLan is implemented using MindSpore and trained on Huawei Ascend 910B NPUs, demonstrating its compatibility with domestic AI computing infrastructure. In a seven-day sea surface salinity (SSS) forecasting task conducted in the Shenzhen coastal waters, YingLan achieves an average RMSE of 0.687508 PSU, corresponding to relative error reductions of 0.58%, 5.31%, and 12.42% compared with LangYa, XiHe, and GloNet2, respectively. These results provide initial evidence of the model's effectiveness in regional ocean forecasting, while broader cross-task and cross-regional evaluations remain necessary to assess its generalization capabilities.

cs.LG↗

AD-Mamba: Architecture-Complementary Knowledge Distillation for Efficient and Robust Audio Classification

Recent advancements in large-scale audio classification have been primarily driven by Transformer-based architectures due to their strong capacity in modeling long-range dependencies. However, their inherent quadratic complexity limits scalability and efficiency, especially when processing long or sparsely informative audio streams. Mamba, a recently proposed state space model (SSM), offers a promising alternative by enabling efficient long-range modeling with linear sequence scaling. Nevertheless, existing Mamba-based audio classification methods still lag behind mainstream Transformer-based models, suggesting that effective training strategies for fully exploiting the audio modeling potential of SSMs remain underexplored. To address this issue, we propose AD-Mamba, an architecture-complementary multi-stage knowledge distillation framework that transfers the local modeling strength of CNNs and the global contextual modeling capability of Transformers into a Mamba-based student model. Specifically, the CNN-guided stages encourage the student to adapt to local spectro-temporal structures, while the Transformer-guided stage further refines global semantic discrimination and contextual modeling. Experimental results on AudioSet show that AD-Mamba achieves 50.3% mean average precision (mAP) with only 30M parameters, outperforming representative Transformer-based and Mamba-based audio classification baselines with lower computational cost. Further evaluations under long-form audio, sparse-information, and noise-interference conditions show that AD-Mamba consistently outperforms representative CNN and Transformer baselines. When transferred to FSD50K, ESC-50, and DCASE16, the proposed model also achieves superior performance, demonstrating strong generalization across audio classification tasks.

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SKAD: Sketch-Guided Audio-Contrastive Decoding for Reasoning in Large Audio-Language Models

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have shown increasing potential in audio understanding and reasoning by generating intermediate reasoning steps before answering. However, directly eliciting long-form reasoning from audio does not always lead to more reliable predictions. Even reasoning-oriented LALMs may gradually shift from acoustic evidence to language-continuation patterns during generation. A natural solution is to use contrastive decoding with an audio-masked branch, but directly applying this strategy to plain chain-of-thought reasoning is often ineffective, since the masked branch lacks sufficient audio-related context and provides an unstable reference. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{SKAD} (\textbf{Sk}etch-Guided \textbf{A}udio-Contrastive \textbf{D}ecoding), a training-free inference-time method for audio reasoning. SKAD first constructs an acoustic evidence sketch that summarizes question-relevant auditory information. It then performs contrastive decoding between an audio-conditioned reasoning branch and a sketch-only branch. By using the sketch as a shared semantic scaffold, SKAD makes the masked branch more informative and encourages decoding decisions that are more dependent on the original audio. We evaluate SKAD on Qwen2.5-Omni-7B and Step-Audio-R1 across three audio understanding and reasoning benchmarks: MMAR, MMAU, and MMSU. Experimental results show that SKAD consistently improves the average accuracy of both models across all benchmarks. Further ablations show that direct contrastive decoding without the acoustic evidence sketch provides limited or negative gains, confirming the importance of constructing a reliable contrastive reference before audio-contrastive decoding.

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RecurTrace: Adaptive Latent Reasoning with Loop-Time Memory

Repeating a small block of middle layers increases a language model's effective inference depth without adding parameters or generating extra tokens, and recent work shows that this latent recurrence improves reasoning. However, two design choices limit these gains. Each iteration sees only the previous output and cannot directly access earlier computations. Moreover, a fixed loop count wastes depth on easy inputs while leaving hard ones with too little computation. We introduce RecurTrace, which addresses both limitations using the loop's own trajectory. Specifically, Loop Memory Attention lets each looped layer attend to its own states from previous iterations along the loop-time axis, so the model can revisit earlier computations instead of relying on the latest state alone. A halting head then reads the loop state and predicts whether to continue, with supervision from an oracle that identifies when additional depth still reduces loss. In a controlled MathQA comparison on the same looped backbone, RecurTrace achieves 56.9% accuracy with an average of 2.0 loops, exceeding the best fixed loop depth by 2.2 points at matched compute. By comparison, ACT and PonderNet collapse to one loop, and CALM reaches only 54.1% with 5.6 loops, while the stronger LoopUS-Conf and TaH-Mismatch baselines reach 55.3% at 3.2 loops and 55.7% at 2.1 loops. Finally, RecurTrace improves generation accuracy over same-budget fine-tuned baselines at 0.6B, 1.7B, 4B, and 8B, with the gain growing with model size from 0.6 to 3.4 points.

cs.LG↗

EmoS: A Theory-Grounded Framework for Evaluating and Aligning Emotional Intelligence in Spoken Language Models

Despite significant advances in instruction-following and auditory comprehension, the evaluation of Emotional Intelligence (EI) in Spoken Language Models (SLMs) remains confined to rudimentary paralinguistic perception, lacking a systematic, theory-driven cognitive framework. We introduce EmoSBench, the first comprehensive EI evaluation benchmark for SLMs constructed upon the four-branch theoretical model, covering Perceiving, Understanding, Using, and Managing Emotion across ten sub-tasks. Preliminary assessments on EmoSBench reveal a substantial gap: even leading proprietary models like GPT-4o-Audio achieve only 52.6%, significantly trailing human baselines. To bridge this gap, we develop EmoS, a specialized evaluator model optimized via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). To facilitate its effective training, we curate EmoDialogue, a bilingual dataset providing necessary fine-grained supervision through response pairs with rigorously defined EI gradations. Concurrently, we introduce a reward mechanism integrating a Steep Exponential Accuracy Reward (SEAR) and a Rationale Fidelity Reward (RFR) to enforce precise ordinal scoring and valid reasoning. Experiments demonstrate that EmoS reaches 83.8% accuracy, approaching human-level performance. Furthermore, evaluations on authentic, unconstrained spoken interactions validate its robust real-world generalization, establishing a foundational framework for advancing emotionally intelligent dialogue systems.

cs.CL↗

EChO-Agent: Evidence Chain Orchestration Agent for Audio Reasoning

While LALMs show promise on audio question answering, they fail to focus on question-relevant segments of audio and provide a clear, checkable reasoning process when dealing with complex audio reasoning. Reinforcement learning and tool-augmented prompting can help models better relate questions to audio but lack a reliable way to understand, integrate, and self-verify audio segments. To address this gap, we present EChO-Agent, a modular agent framework that reformulates complex audio QA as a planning, tool execution, evidence integration, and answer verification workflow. Experiments on MMAR benchmark show EChO-Agent improves both accuracy and rubric scores over baseline and ablation studies show evidence integration is the key factor.

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COGNITION: From Evaluation to Defense against Multimodal LLM CAPTCHA Solvers

This paper studies how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) undermine the security guarantees of visual CAPTCHA. We identify the attack surface where an adversary can cheaply automate CAPTCHA solving using off-the-shelf models. We evaluate 7 representative MLLMs on 18 real-world CAPTCHA task types, measuring single-shot accuracy, success under limited retries, end-to-end latency, and per-solve cost. We further validate our findings through a supplemental external dataset and an adaptive-attacker setting with session memory, while also analyzing the impact of task-specific prompt engineering and few-shot demonstrations on solver effectiveness. We reveal that MLLMs can reliably solve recognition-oriented and low-interaction CAPTCHA tasks at human-like cost and latency, whereas tasks requiring fine-grained localization, multi-step spatial reasoning, or cross-frame consistency remain significantly harder for current models. By examining the reasoning traces of such MLLMs, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of why models succeed/fail on specific CAPTCHA puzzles and use these insights to derive defense-oriented guidelines for selecting and strengthening CAPTCHA tasks. To validate these principles, we present a proof-of-concept by hardening a vulnerable CAPTCHA type using our guidelines. We demonstrate that incorporating fine-grained localization and implicit counting reduces the success rate of state-of-the-art MLLMs from over 95\% to 0\%, confirming that structural changes can effectively mitigate the threat. We conclude by emphasizing the urgent need for CAPTCHA redesign as MLLM capabilities increasingly threaten existing defenses. Code Availability (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20406852).

cs.CR↗

LLM-as-a-Reviewer: Benchmarking Their Ability, Divergence, and Prompt Injection Resistance as Paper Reviewers

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in academic peer review, yet their reliability, alignment with human judgment, and robustness to adversarial attacks remain poorly understood. We present a systematic benchmark of LLM-as-a-Reviewer on 898 papers stratified from NeurIPS and ICLR, evaluating 12 LLMs along three axes: rating calibration, divergence from human reviewers, and resistance to prompt injection embedded via an invisible font-mapping attack. We find that LLMs systematically overrate weaker submissions and diverge from humans in topical emphasis, under-flagging Clarity and over-flagging Reproducibility, while producing reviews two to three times longer with lower lexical diversity and a more standardized vocabulary. Prompt injection remains highly effective. Simple hidden instructions can promote low-scoring papers to acceptance-level ratings in a substantial fraction of cases, with effectiveness varying sharply across model families. While LLMs offer utility in structuring evaluations, their integration into peer review requires safeguards against both intrinsic biases and adversarial risks.

cs.CL↗

Prompt Overflow: What the Guardrail Inspects Is Not What the Model Infers

Guardrail models (a.k.a. safety checkers) are widely deployed to screen user inputs before they reach large language models (LLMs), serving as a primary defense against prompt injection attacks. Due to strict context constraints, these models handle overlength prompts through truncation or segmentation-based inspection. While prior work has focused on semantic adversarial inputs, the security implications of these long-input processing mechanisms remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we identify a critical blind spot arising from the mismatch between the limited inspection windows of guardrail models and the substantially larger context inference windows of downstream LLMs. We introduce a novel Prompt Overflow Attack, which exploits this mismatch by fragmenting malicious instructions and interleaving them with benign filler content across an overlong prompt, such that no individual inspected segment appears malicious while the full context remains actionable to the LLM. Through a systematic evaluation against state-of-the-art guardrail models, including Meta Llama Prompt Guard, IBM Granite Guardian, and DeBERTa-based detectors, we demonstrate that prompts reliably detected in short-context settings can evade guardrail models once adversarially manipulated into over-length inputs, yet remain fully actionable by downstream LLMs. We further propose potential defense strategies and outline mitigation directions to strengthen guardrail models.

cs.CR↗

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.

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LORT: Locally Refined Convolution and Taylor Transformer for Monaural Speech Enhancement

Achieving superior enhancement performance while maintaining a low parameter count and computational complexity remains a challenge in the field of speech enhancement. In this paper, we introduce LORT, a novel architecture that integrates spatial-channel enhanced Taylor Transformer and locally refined convolution for efficient and robust speech enhancement. We propose a Taylor multi-head self-attention (T-MSA) module enhanced with spatial-channel enhancement attention (SCEA), designed to facilitate inter-channel information exchange and alleviate the spatial attention limitations inherent in Taylor-based Transformers. To complement global modeling, we further present a locally refined convolution (LRC) block that integrates convolutional feed-forward layers, time-frequency dense local convolutions, and gated units to capture fine-grained local details. Built upon a U-Net-like encoder-decoder structure with only 16 output channels in the encoder, LORT processes noisy inputs through multi-resolution T-MSA modules using alternating downsampling and upsampling operations. The enhanced magnitude and phase spectra are decoded independently and optimized through a composite loss function that jointly considers magnitude, complex, phase, discriminator, and consistency objectives. Experimental results on the VCTK+DEMAND and DNS Challenge datasets demonstrate that LORT achieves competitive or superior performance to state-of-the-art (SOTA) models with only 0.96M parameters, highlighting its effectiveness for real-world speech enhancement applications with limited computational resources.

eess.AS↗

Pay More Attention To Audio: Mitigating Imbalance of Cross-Modal Attention in Large Audio Language Models

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) often suffer from audio-textual attention imbalance, prioritizing text over acoustic information, particularly in the multi-modal fusion layers of the Transformer architecture. This bias hinders their ability to fully utilize acoustic cues, causing suboptimal performance on audio reasoning tasks. To mitigate this, we propose \textbf{MATA}, a novel training-free method that dynamically pushes LALMs to pay \textbf{M}ore \textbf{A}ttention \textbf{T}o \textbf{A}udio tokens within the self-attention mechanism. Specifically, MATA intervenes post raw attention scoring, targeting only the last token in intermediate layers without introducing additional parameters or computational overhead. Experiments on the MMAU and MMAR benchmarks confirm MATA's effectiveness, with consistent performance gains. Notably, on MMAR, MATA enables an open-source model to surpass the proprietary Gemini 2.0 Flash for the first time. Our work provides an efficient solution to mitigate attention bias and opens a new research direction for enhancing the audio-processing capabilities of multi-modal models.

cs.SD↗

AdaBrain-Bench: Benchmarking Brain Foundation Models for Brain-Computer Interface Applications

Non-invasive Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) offer a safe and accessible means of connecting the human brain to external devices, with broad applications in home and clinical settings to enhance human capabilities. However, the high noise level and limited task-specific data in non-invasive signals constrain decoding capabilities. Recently, the adoption of self-supervised pre-training is transforming the landscape of non-invasive BCI research, enabling the development of brain foundation models to capture generic neural representations from large-scale unlabeled electroencephalography (EEG) signals with substantial noises. However, despite these advances, the field currently lacks comprehensive, practical and extensible benchmarks to assess the utility of the public foundation models across diverse BCI tasks, hindering their widespread adoption. To address this challenge, we present AdaBrain-Bench, a large-scale standardized benchmark to systematically evaluate brain foundation models in widespread non-invasive BCI tasks. AdaBrain-Bench encompasses a diverse collection of representative BCI decoding datasets spanning 7 key applications. It introduces a streamlined task adaptation pipeline integrated with multi-dimensional evaluation metrics and a set of adaptation tools. The benchmark delivers an inclusive framework for assessing generalizability of brain foundation models across key transfer settings, including cross-subject, multi-subject, and few-shot scenarios. We leverage AdaBrain-Bench to evaluate a suite of publicly available brain foundation models and offer insights into practices for selecting appropriate models in various scenarios. We make our benchmark pipeline available to enable reproducible research and external use, offering a continuously evolving platform to foster progress toward robust and generalized neural decoding solutions.

cs.LG↗

ASDA: Audio Spectrogram Differential Attention Mechanism for Self-Supervised Representation Learning

In recent advancements in audio self-supervised representation learning, the standard Transformer architecture has emerged as the predominant approach, yet its attention mechanism often allocates a portion of attention weights to irrelevant information, potentially impairing the model's discriminative ability. To address this, we introduce a differential attention mechanism, which effectively mitigates ineffective attention allocation through the integration of dual-softmax operations and appropriately tuned differential coefficients. Experimental results demonstrate that our ASDA model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across multiple benchmarks, including audio classification (49.0% mAP on AS-2M, 41.5% mAP on AS20K), keyword spotting (98.3% accuracy on SPC-2), and environmental sound classification (96.1% accuracy on ESC-50). These results highlight ASDA's effectiveness in audio tasks, paving the way for broader applications.

cs.SD↗

PrimeK-Net: Multi-scale Spectral Learning via Group Prime-Kernel Convolutional Neural Networks for Single Channel Speech Enhancement

Single-channel speech enhancement is a challenging ill-posed problem focused on estimating clean speech from degraded signals. Existing studies have demonstrated the competitive performance of combining convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with Transformers in speech enhancement tasks. However, existing frameworks have not sufficiently addressed computational efficiency and have overlooked the natural multi-scale distribution of the spectrum. Additionally, the potential of CNNs in speech enhancement has yet to be fully realized. To address these issues, this study proposes a Deep Separable Dilated Dense Block (DSDDB) and a Group Prime Kernel Feedforward Channel Attention (GPFCA) module. Specifically, the DSDDB introduces higher parameter and computational efficiency to the Encoder/Decoder of existing frameworks. The GPFCA module replaces the position of the Conformer, extracting deep temporal and frequency features of the spectrum with linear complexity. The GPFCA leverages the proposed Group Prime Kernel Feedforward Network (GPFN) to integrate multi-granularity long-range, medium-range, and short-range receptive fields, while utilizing the properties of prime numbers to avoid periodic overlap effects. Experimental results demonstrate that PrimeK-Net, proposed in this study, achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the VoiceBank+Demand dataset, reaching a PESQ score of 3.61 with only 1.41M parameters.

eess.AS↗

Whole Heart Perfusion with High-Multiband Simultaneous Multislice Imaging via Linear Phase Modulated Extended Field of View (SMILE)

Purpose: To develop a simultaneous multislice (SMS) first-pass perfusion technique that can achieve whole heart coverage with high multi-band factors, while avoiding the issue of slice leakage. Methods: The proposed Simultaneous Multislice Imaging via Linear phase modulated Extended field of view (SMILE) treats the SMS acquisition and reconstruction within an extended field of view framework, allowing arbitrarily under-sampling of phase encoding lines of the extended k-space matrix and enabling the direct application of 2D parallel imaging reconstruction techniques. We presented a theoretical framework that offers insights into the performance of SMILE. We performed retrospective comparison on 28 subjects and prospective perfusion experiments on 43 patients undergoing routine clinical CMR studies with SMILE at multiband (MB) factors of 3-5, with a net acceleration rate ($R$) of 8 and 10 respectively, and compared SMILE to conventional SMS techniques using standard FOV 2D CAIPI acquisition and standard 2D slice separation techniques including split-slice GRAPPA and ROCK-SPIRiT. Results: Retrospective studies demonstrated 5.2 to 8.0 dB improvement in signal to error ratio (SER) of SMILE over CAIPI perfusion. Prospective studies showed good image quality with grades of 4.1 $\pm$ 0.7 for MB = 3, $R$ = 8 and 3.5 $\pm$ 1.0 for MB = 5, $R$ = 10. (5-point Likert Scale) Conclusion: The theoretical derivation and experimental results validate the SMILE's improved performance at high acceleration and MB as compared to the existing 2D CAIPI SMS acquisition and reconstruction techniques for first-pass myocardial perfusion imaging.

eess.SP↗

Mamba-SEUNet: Mamba UNet for Monaural Speech Enhancement

In recent speech enhancement (SE) research, transformer and its variants have emerged as the predominant methodologies. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism imposes certain limitations on practical deployment. Mamba, as a novel state-space model (SSM), has gained widespread application in natural language processing and computer vision due to its strong capabilities in modeling long sequences and relatively low computational complexity. In this work, we introduce Mamba-SEUNet, an innovative architecture that integrates Mamba with U-Net for SE tasks. By leveraging bidirectional Mamba to model forward and backward dependencies of speech signals at different resolutions, and incorporating skip connections to capture multi-scale information, our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Experimental results on the VCTK+DEMAND dataset indicate that Mamba-SEUNet attains a PESQ score of 3.59, while maintaining low computational complexity. When combined with the Perceptual Contrast Stretching technique, Mamba-SEUNet further improves the PESQ score to 3.73.

cs.SD↗