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Yusheng Dai

Publications and source records attributed to Yusheng Dai.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

Multi-Expert Conformal Risk Control for Pairwise LLM Judging in Open-Ended Dialogue

In this paper, we explore multi-expert Conformal Risk Control (CRC) algorithms for pairwise LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation in open-ended dialogue. Our core insight is that multi-expert aggregation offers a complementary remedy to CRC: whereas CRC controls risk at the decision threshold through abstention, aggregation sanitizes the scoring function at its source. Guided by this, we first design two multi-expert CRC methods: Score Averaging and Decision Voting, which aggregate at the score and decision levels, respectively. While both strategies outperform single-expert methods on homogeneous expert panels, on heterogeneous LLM judges they remain risk-valid but recover only limited coverage, because a uniform threshold cannot match the experts' distinct scoring scales. To resolve this issue, we further propose Marginal-Calibrated Conformal Consensus (MC3): it captures distinct per-expert scales via initial threshold ratios, while jointly tuning a unified decision function $C_t(x)$ applied identically in both calibration and test, thereby preserving exchangeability. To evaluate our framework, we construct Panel, a 1,800-pair human pairwise-preference benchmark for open-ended dialogue. It is built on responses generated by four open-weight LLMs over dialogue contexts from three domains (ESConv, MSC, DREAM), with full logit access. In experiments, we find that both Score Averaging and Decision Voting substantially improve accuracy and acceptance rate on homogeneous panels. Notably, MC3 extends these gains to heterogeneous panels by accommodating distinct per-expert scoring scales across all three datasets.

cs.CL

Fourier is Frontier: Frequency-Aware Autoencoding for High-Fidelity Music Reconstruction

Continuous-latent audio autoencoders form the backbone of latent music generators, yet decoders at high compression rates commonly exhibit three failure modes: high-frequency loss, phase incoherence, and stereo-image collapse. These share a structural root: waveform autoencoders lack an explicit frequency axis, leaving no handle for targeted per-band correction. Among five matched-budget representations, the complex STFT achieves the lowest full-band and high-frequency spectral distances, providing direct access to magnitude and phase at every bin. Building on this, we present ear-VAE2, a complex-spectral autoencoder with cross-channel interaction. Spec-SnakeBeta learns a periodic activation per frequency bin with frequency-dependent initialization, outperforming other activation variants while using fewer parameters than the fully independent variant. Duplex-Aware Refiner applies band-specific corrections to magnitude and phase following duplex theory of sound localization. On the 546-track Song Describer Dataset, ear-VAE2 achieves the best point estimates on five of seven reconstruction metrics. The Duplex-Aware Refiner reduces Mel Distance by 19.4% and uses ~45% fewer residual-output dimensions than the Unconstrained Refiner, while also lowering spectral distances, spatial-cue errors, and receiving higher ratings from professional engineers. The downstream generator using ear-VAE2 latents achieves better point estimates on all 12 automatic metrics.Demo page is available at https://eps-acoustic-revolution-lab.github.io/EAR_VAE2/.

cs.SD

CineDub: Scaling End-to-End Video Dubbing to Multi-Speaker Dialogues with Coherent Sound Effects

Automatic video dubbing in the wild remains fundamentally limited by two competing constraints: hierarchical methods depend on brittle, multi-stage preprocessing pipelines that severely restrict data scalability and practical deployment, while holistic approaches operating on uncropped video suffer from weak temporal alignment and speaker-utterance ambiguity in multi-speaker settings. To overcome these limitations, we propose CineDub, a unified diffusion-based model that achieves precise multi-speaker dialogue dubbing directly from uncropped videos, without face cropping or speaker diarization. Central to our approach is the Implicitly-Coupled Holistic Conditioning (ICHC) paradigm, where holistic visual representations and a semantic-bundled transcription format are encoded independently, yet implicitly coupled through cross-modal training to resolve speaker ambiguity and enable precise multi-speaker multi-turn dialogue dubbing. Building on the unified temporal cues captured by holistic visual features, we further extend CineDub to joint speech and audio generation. We introduce an Ambient-to-Linguistic Curriculum Learning (ALC) to mitigate sub-task degradation, and a decoupled textual branch control mechanism to resolve cross-prompt interference during simultaneous generation. We also release two in-the-wild benchmarks, CineDub-Multi for multi-speaker dialogue dubbing and CineDub-SA for video-to-speech-and-audio (V2SA) generation, to enable evaluation under realistic conditions. Experiments show that CineDub achieves state-of-the-art results on established single-speaker dubbing and video-to-audio benchmarks while excelling in multi-speaker dialogue dubbing and acoustically coherent joint generation.

eess.AS

Visual Representation Matters: Exploiting Temporal Differences in Video-to-Audio Generation

Video-to-audio (V2A) generation extends image-to-audio generation (I2A) by introducing consecutive frames that provide essential temporal cues for audio synthesis. However, existing conditional diffusion-based V2A methods typically enhance visual conditioning with additional audio-visual supervision, acoustic structure prediction, or reasoning from large multimodal models, requiring extra networks or strong inductive biases. Inspired by recent advances in visual representation learning, we introduce TD-V2A, which leverages temporal differences (TD) as the key representation that distinguishes V2A from I2A, enriching visual conditioning with minimal architectural modification. We first investigate TD at both the frame and feature levels to identify the most effective representation level at which TD complements visual representations. Based on these findings, we develop a hierarchically continual learning strategy and an annealed temporal differences guidance method to progressively learn and exploit TD information during diffusion training and sampling process, respectively. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that effectively exploiting TD through our proposed framework significantly improves end-to-end V2A generation quality, even outperforming dedicated V2A representations such as contrastive audio-visual pretraining.

cs.CV

FreeSonic: Training-Free Temporal-Aware Decoupled Attention for Precise Audio Editing

Text-to-audio (TTA) generation has made significant strides, yet achieving precise and consistent audio editing remains a major challenge. However, existing methods struggle to balance temporal consistency with background preservation. In this paper, we propose FreeSonic, a training-free framework leveraging the state-of-the-art Rectified Flow-based TangoFlux model. FreeSonic utilizes an optimized inversion-reverse process and joint text-audio attention maps for precise target segment extraction. For content editing, a novel scheduled attention decoupling confines modifications to target regions while preserving original acoustic context. Furthermore, task-oriented noise injection enhances versatility for tasks such as audio removal and non-rigid replacement. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FreeSonic achieves a superior balance by providing a high-fidelity and efficient solution for precise and consistent audio editing. Project and demos: https://free-sonic.github.io/

cs.SD

Omni2Sound: Towards Unified Video-Text-to-Audio Generation

Training a unified model integrating video-to-audio (V2A), text-to-audio (T2A), and joint video-text-to-audio (VT2A) generation offers significant application flexibility, yet faces two unexplored foundational challenges: (1) the scarcity of high-quality audio captions with tight V-A-T alignment, leading to severe semantic conflict between multimodal conditions, and (2) cross-task and intra-task competition, manifesting as an adverse V2A-T2A performance trade-off and modality bias in the VT2A task. First, to address data scarcity, we introduce SoundAtlas, a large-scale dataset (470k pairs) that significantly outperforms existing benchmarks and even human experts in quality. Powered by a novel agentic pipeline, it integrates Vision-to-Language Compression to mitigate visual bias of MLLMs, a Junior-Senior Agent Handoff for a 5$\times$ cost reduction, and rigorous Post-hoc Filtering to ensure fidelity. Consequently, SoundAtlas delivers semantically rich and temporally detailed captions with tight V-A-T alignment. Second, we propose Omni2Sound, a unified VT2A diffusion model supporting flexible input modalities. To resolve the inherent cross-task and intra-task competition, we design a three-stage multi-task progressive training schedule that converts cross-task competition into joint optimization and mitigates modality bias in the VT2A task, maintaining both audio-visual alignment and off-screen audio generation faithfulness. Finally, we construct VGGSound-Omni, a comprehensive benchmark for unified evaluation, including challenging off-screen tracks. With a standard DiT backbone, Omni2Sound achieves unified SOTA performance across all three tasks within a single model, demonstrating strong generalization across benchmarks with heterogeneous input conditions.

cs.SD

ControlAudio: Tackling Text-Guided, Timing-Indicated and Intelligible Audio Generation via Progressive Diffusion Modeling

Text-to-audio (TTA) generation with fine-grained control signals, e.g., precise timing control or intelligible speech content, has been explored in recent works. However, constrained by data scarcity, their generation performance at scale is still compromised. In this study, we recast controllable TTA generation as a multi-task learning problem and introduce a progressive diffusion modeling approach, ControlAudio. Our method adeptly fits distributions conditioned on more fine-grained information, including text, timing, and phoneme features, through a step-by-step strategy. First, we propose a data construction method spanning both annotation and simulation, augmenting condition information in the sequence of text, timing, and phoneme. Second, at the model training stage, we pretrain a diffusion transformer (DiT) on large-scale text-audio pairs, achieving scalable TTA generation, and then incrementally integrate the timing and phoneme features with unified semantic representations, expanding controllability. Finally, at the inference stage, we propose progressively guided generation, which sequentially emphasizes more fine-grained information, aligning inherently with the coarse-to-fine sampling nature of DiT. Extensive experiments show that ControlAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of temporal accuracy and speech clarity, significantly outperforming existing methods on both objective and subjective evaluations. Demo samples are available at: https://control-audio.github.io/Control-Audio.

cs.SD

Latent Swap Joint Diffusion for 2D Long-Form Latent Generation

This paper introduces Swap Forward (SaFa), a modality-agnostic and efficient method to generate seamless and coherence long spectrum and panorama through latent swap joint diffusion across multi-views. We first investigate the spectrum aliasing problem in spectrum-based audio generation caused by existing joint diffusion methods. Through a comparative analysis of the VAE latent representation of Mel-spectra and RGB images, we identify that the failure arises from excessive suppression of high-frequency components during the spectrum denoising process due to the averaging operator. To address this issue, we propose Self-Loop Latent Swap, a frame-level bidirectional swap applied to the overlapping region of adjacent views. Leveraging stepwise differentiated trajectories of adjacent subviews, this swap operator adaptively enhances high-frequency components and avoid spectrum distortion. Furthermore, to improve global cross-view consistency in non-overlapping regions, we introduce Reference-Guided Latent Swap, a unidirectional latent swap operator that provides a centralized reference trajectory to synchronize subview diffusions. By refining swap timing and intervals, we can achieve a cross-view similarity-diversity balance in a forward-only manner. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that SaFa significantly outperforms existing joint diffusion methods and even training-based methods in audio generation using both U-Net and DiT models, along with effective longer length adaptation. It also adapts well to panorama generation, achieving comparable performance with 2 $\sim$ 20 $\times$ faster speed and greater model generalizability. More generation demos are available at https://swapforward.github.io/

cs.SD

Improving Audio-Visual Speech Recognition by Lip-Subword Correlation Based Visual Pre-training and Cross-Modal Fusion Encoder

In recent research, slight performance improvement is observed from automatic speech recognition systems to audio-visual speech recognition systems in the end-to-end framework with low-quality videos. Unmatching convergence rates and specialized input representations between audio and visual modalities are considered to cause the problem. In this paper, we propose two novel techniques to improve audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) under a pre-training and fine-tuning training framework. First, we explore the correlation between lip shapes and syllable-level subword units in Mandarin to establish good frame-level syllable boundaries from lip shapes. This enables accurate alignment of video and audio streams during visual model pre-training and cross-modal fusion. Next, we propose an audio-guided cross-modal fusion encoder (CMFE) neural network to utilize main training parameters for multiple cross-modal attention layers to make full use of modality complementarity. Experiments on the MISP2021-AVSR data set show the effectiveness of the two proposed techniques. Together, using only a relatively small amount of training data, the final system achieves better performances than state-of-the-art systems with more complex front-ends and back-ends.

cs.CL

A Study of Dropout-Induced Modality Bias on Robustness to Missing Video Frames for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

Advanced Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) systems have been observed to be sensitive to missing video frames, performing even worse than single-modality models. While applying the dropout technique to the video modality enhances robustness to missing frames, it simultaneously results in a performance loss when dealing with complete data input. In this paper, we investigate this contrasting phenomenon from the perspective of modality bias and reveal that an excessive modality bias on the audio caused by dropout is the underlying reason. Moreover, we present the Modality Bias Hypothesis (MBH) to systematically describe the relationship between modality bias and robustness against missing modality in multimodal systems. Building on these findings, we propose a novel Multimodal Distribution Approximation with Knowledge Distillation (MDA-KD) framework to reduce over-reliance on the audio modality and to maintain performance and robustness simultaneously. Finally, to address an entirely missing modality, we adopt adapters to dynamically switch decision strategies. The effectiveness of our proposed approach is evaluated and validated through a series of comprehensive experiments using the MISP2021 and MISP2022 datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/dalision/ModalBiasAVSR

cs.SD

The Multimodal Information Based Speech Processing (MISP) 2023 Challenge: Audio-Visual Target Speaker Extraction

Previous Multimodal Information based Speech Processing (MISP) challenges mainly focused on audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) with commendable success. However, the most advanced back-end recognition systems often hit performance limits due to the complex acoustic environments. This has prompted a shift in focus towards the Audio-Visual Target Speaker Extraction (AVTSE) task for the MISP 2023 challenge in ICASSP 2024 Signal Processing Grand Challenges. Unlike existing audio-visual speech enhance-ment challenges primarily focused on simulation data, the MISP 2023 challenge uniquely explores how front-end speech processing, combined with visual clues, impacts back-end tasks in real-world scenarios. This pioneering effort aims to set the first benchmark for the AVTSE task, offering fresh insights into enhancing the ac-curacy of back-end speech recognition systems through AVTSE in challenging and real acoustic environments. This paper delivers a thorough overview of the task setting, dataset, and baseline system of the MISP 2023 challenge. It also includes an in-depth analysis of the challenges participants may encounter. The experimental results highlight the demanding nature of this task, and we look forward to the innovative solutions participants will bring forward.

eess.AS