Various audio-LLMs (ALLMs) have been explored recently for tackling different audio tasks simultaneously using a single, unified model. While existing evaluations of ALLMs primarily focus on single-audio tasks, real-world applications often involve processing multiple audio streams simultaneously. To bridge this gap, we propose the first multi-audio evaluation (MAE) benchmark that consists of 20 datasets from 11 multi-audio tasks encompassing both speech and sound scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on MAE demonstrate that the existing ALLMs, while being powerful in comprehending primary audio elements in individual audio inputs, struggling to handle multi-audio scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel multi-audio-LLM (MALLM) to capture audio context among multiple similar audios using discriminative learning on our proposed synthetic data. The results demonstrate that the proposed MALLM outperforms all baselines and achieves high data efficiency using synthetic data without requiring human annotations. The proposed MALLM opens the door for ALLMs towards multi-audio processing era and brings us closer to replicating human auditory capabilities in machines.
TSE(Target Speaker Extraction) aims to extract the clean speech of the target speaker in an audio mixture, thus eliminating irrelevant background noise and speech. While prior work has explored various auxiliary cues including pre-recorded speech, visual information (e.g., lip motions and gestures), and spatial information, the acquisition and selection of such strong cues are infeasible in many practical scenarios. Unlike all existing work, in this paper, we condition the TSE algorithm on semantic cues extracted from limited and unaligned text content, such as condensed points from a presentation slide. This method is particularly useful in scenarios like meetings, poster sessions, or lecture presentations, where acquiring other cues in real-time is challenging. To this end, we design two different networks. Specifically, our proposed TPE fuses audio features with content-based semantic cues to facilitate time-frequency mask generation to filter out extraneous noise, while another proposal, namely TSR, employs the contrastive learning technique to associate blindly separated speech signals with semantic cues. The experimental results show the efficacy in accurately identifying the target speaker by utilizing semantic cues derived from limited and unaligned text, resulting in SI-SDRi of 12.16 dB, SDRi of 12.66 dB, PESQi of 0.830 and STOIi of 0.150, respectively. Dataset and source code will be publicly available. Project demo page: //slideTSE.github.io/.
Methods for image-to-video generation have achieved impressive, photo-realistic quality. However, adjusting specific elements in generated videos, such as object motion or camera movement, is often a tedious process of trial and error, e.g., involving re-generating videos with different random seeds. Recent techniques address this issue by fine-tuning a pre-trained model to follow conditioning signals, such as bounding boxes or point trajectories. Yet, this fine-tuning procedure can be computationally expensive, and it requires datasets with annotated object motion, which can be difficult to procure. In this work, we introduce SG-I2V, a framework for controllable image-to-video generation that is self-guided$\unicode{x2013}$offering zero-shot control by relying solely on the knowledge present in a pre-trained image-to-video diffusion model without the need for fine-tuning or external knowledge. Our zero-shot method outperforms unsupervised baselines while being competitive with supervised models in terms of visual quality and motion fidelity.
The advent of AI-Generated Content (AIGC) has spurred research into automated video generation to streamline conventional processes. However, automating storytelling video production, particularly for customized narratives, remains challenging due to the complexity of maintaining subject consistency across shots. While existing approaches like Mora and AesopAgent integrate multiple agents for Story-to-Video (S2V) generation, they fall short in preserving protagonist consistency and supporting Customized Storytelling Video Generation (CSVG). To address these limitations, we propose StoryAgent, a multi-agent framework designed for CSVG. StoryAgent decomposes CSVG into distinct subtasks assigned to specialized agents, mirroring the professional production process. Notably, our framework includes agents for story design, storyboard generation, video creation, agent coordination, and result evaluation. Leveraging the strengths of different models, StoryAgent enhances control over the generation process, significantly improving character consistency. Specifically, we introduce a customized Image-to-Video (I2V) method, LoRA-BE, to enhance intra-shot temporal consistency, while a novel storyboard generation pipeline is proposed to maintain subject consistency across shots. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in synthesizing highly consistent storytelling videos, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Our contributions include the introduction of StoryAgent, a versatile framework for video generation tasks, and novel techniques for preserving protagonist consistency.
While piano music has become a significant area of study in Music Information Retrieval (MIR), there is a notable lack of datasets for piano solo music with text labels. To address this gap, we present PIAST (PIano dataset with Audio, Symbolic, and Text), a piano music dataset. Utilizing a piano-specific taxonomy of semantic tags, we collected 9,673 tracks from YouTube and added human annotations for 2,023 tracks by music experts, resulting in two subsets: PIAST-YT and PIAST-AT. Both include audio, text, tag annotations, and transcribed MIDI utilizing state-of-the-art piano transcription and beat tracking models. Among many possible tasks with the multi-modal dataset, we conduct music tagging and retrieval using both audio and MIDI data and report baseline performances to demonstrate its potential as a valuable resource for MIR research.
Universal sound separation (USS) is a task of separating mixtures of arbitrary sound sources. Typically, universal separation models are trained from scratch in a supervised manner, using labeled data. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is an emerging deep learning approach that leverages unlabeled data to obtain task-agnostic representations, which can benefit many downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose integrating a self-supervised pre-trained model, namely the audio masked autoencoder (A-MAE), into a universal sound separation system to enhance its separation performance. We employ two strategies to utilize SSL embeddings: freezing or updating the parameters of A-MAE during fine-tuning. The SSL embeddings are concatenated with the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) to serve as input features for the separation model. We evaluate our methods on the AudioSet dataset, and the experimental results indicate that the proposed methods successfully enhance the separation performance of a state-of-the-art ResUNet-based USS model.
Modern Text-to-Image (T2I) Diffusion models have revolutionized image editing by enabling the generation of high-quality photorealistic images. While the de facto method for performing edits with T2I models is through text instructions, this approach non-trivial due to the complex many-to-many mapping between natural language and images. In this work, we address exemplar-based image editing -- the task of transferring an edit from an exemplar pair to a content image(s). We propose ReEdit, a modular and efficient end-to-end framework that captures edits in both text and image modalities while ensuring the fidelity of the edited image. We validate the effectiveness of ReEdit through extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art baselines and sensitivity analyses of key design choices. Our results demonstrate that ReEdit consistently outperforms contemporary approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively. Additionally, ReEdit boasts high practical applicability, as it does not require any task-specific optimization and is four times faster than the next best baseline.
Modulation classification is a very challenging task since the signals intertwine with various ambient noises. Methods are required that can classify them without adding extra steps like denoising, which introduces computational complexity. In this study, we propose a vision transformer (ViT) based model named NMformer to predict the channel modulation images with different noise levels in wireless communication. Since ViTs are most effective for RGB images, we generated constellation diagrams from the modulated signals. The diagrams provide the information from the signals in a 2-D representation form. We trained NMformer on 106, 800 modulation images to build the base classifier and only used 3, 000 images to fine-tune for specific tasks. Our proposed model has two different kinds of prediction setups: in-distribution and out-of-distribution. Our model achieves 4.67% higher accuracy than the base classifier when finetuned and tested on high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in-distribution classes. Moreover, the fine-tuned low SNR task achieves a higher accuracy than the base classifier. The fine-tuned classifier becomes much more effective than the base classifier by achieving higher accuracy when predicted, even on unseen data from out-of-distribution classes. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of NMformer for a wide range of SNRs.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown dramatic improvements in single image super-resolution (SISR) by using large-scale external samples. Despite their remarkable performance based on the external dataset, they cannot exploit internal information within a specific image. Another problem is that they are applicable only to the specific condition of data that they are supervised. For instance, the low-resolution (LR) image should be a "bicubic" downsampled noise-free image from a high-resolution (HR) one. To address both issues, zero-shot super-resolution (ZSSR) has been proposed for flexible internal learning. However, they require thousands of gradient updates, i.e., long inference time. In this paper, we present Meta-Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Super-Resolution (MZSR), which leverages ZSSR. Precisely, it is based on finding a generic initial parameter that is suitable for internal learning. Thus, we can exploit both external and internal information, where one single gradient update can yield quite considerable results. (See Figure 1). With our method, the network can quickly adapt to a given image condition. In this respect, our method can be applied to a large spectrum of image conditions within a fast adaptation process.
We propose a novel single shot object detection network named Detection with Enriched Semantics (DES). Our motivation is to enrich the semantics of object detection features within a typical deep detector, by a semantic segmentation branch and a global activation module. The segmentation branch is supervised by weak segmentation ground-truth, i.e., no extra annotation is required. In conjunction with that, we employ a global activation module which learns relationship between channels and object classes in a self-supervised manner. Comprehensive experimental results on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In particular, with a VGG16 based DES, we achieve an mAP of 81.7 on VOC2007 test and an mAP of 32.8 on COCO test-dev with an inference speed of 31.5 milliseconds per image on a Titan Xp GPU. With a lower resolution version, we achieve an mAP of 79.7 on VOC2007 with an inference speed of 13.0 milliseconds per image.
We construct targeted audio adversarial examples on automatic speech recognition. Given any audio waveform, we can produce another that is over 99.9% similar, but transcribes as any phrase we choose (at a rate of up to 50 characters per second). We apply our iterative optimization-based attack to Mozilla's implementation DeepSpeech end-to-end, and show it has a 100% success rate. The feasibility of this attack introduce a new domain to study adversarial examples.