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Kejun Zhang

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7 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Diff-V2M: A Hierarchical Conditional Diffusion Model with Explicit Rhythmic Modeling for Video-to-Music Generation

Shulei Ji
Zihao Wang
Jiaxing Yu
Xiangyuan Yang
Shuyu Li
Songruoyao Wu
Kejun Zhang

Video-to-music (V2M) generation aims to create music that aligns with visual content. However, two main challenges persist in existing methods: (1) the lack of explicit rhythm modeling hinders audiovisual temporal alignments; (2) effectively integrating various visual features to condition music generation remains non-trivial. To address these issues, we propose Diff-V2M, a general V2M framework based on a hierarchical conditional diffusion model, comprising two core components: visual feature extraction and conditional music generation. For rhythm modeling, we begin by evaluating several rhythmic representations, including low-resolution mel-spectrograms, tempograms, and onset detection functions (ODF), and devise a rhythmic predictor to infer them directly from videos. To ensure contextual and affective coherence, we also extract semantic and emotional features. All features are incorporated into the generator via a hierarchical cross-attention mechanism, where emotional features shape the affective tone via the first layer, while semantic and rhythmic features are fused in the second cross-attention layer. To enhance feature integration, we introduce timestep-aware fusion strategies, including feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) and weighted fusion, allowing the model to adaptively balance semantic and rhythmic cues throughout the diffusion process. Extensive experiments identify low-resolution ODF as a more effective signal for modeling musical rhythm and demonstrate that Diff-V2M outperforms existing models on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance in terms of objective metrics and subjective comparisons.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

AI-Assisted Human-Pet Artistic Musical Co-Creation for Wellness Therapy

Zihao Wang
Le Ma
Yuhang Jin
Yongsheng Feng
Xin Pan
Shulei Ji
Kejun Zhang

This paper explores AI-mediated human-pet musical co-creation from an interdisciplinary perspective, leveraging recent advancements in animal-assisted therapy. These advancements have shown significant psychosocial benefits, especially in reducing anxiety and enhancing social engagement. Building on these findings, this study innovatively employs pet vocal timbres as 'digital avatars' to enhance emotional investment during the music creation process. We propose PetCoCre, a novel system that applies pet vocal timbres in three distinct character paradigms within AI music creation: (1) PetRhythm: using pet voices as rhythmic percussion through beat synchronization. (2) PetMelody: enabling pet voices to act as melodic instruments via pitch-shifting alignment. (3) PetVocalia: utilizing pet vocal timbres as the target timbre for SVC (Singing Voice Conversion), where the converted singing voice replaces the original singer's voice, thus preserving the original semantic content. Beyond these character paradigms, our technical innovation lies in proposing SaMoye, the first open-source, high-quality zero-shot SVC model that effectively overcomes existing methods' zero-shot limitations by employing mixed speaker embeddings for timbre enhancement and leveraging a large-scale singing voice dataset. In our experiments, we collected dog and cat vocalization data from pet stores and conducted experiments with 30 participants. Results demonstrate that the human-pet co-creation mode led to significant enhancements in pleasure and creative satisfaction compared to solo AI music generation, along with a significant reduction in participants' anxiety levels. Through collaborative art creation, this research pioneers new paradigms for animal-assisted therapeutic interventions and expands the boundaries of AI-assisted creative collaboration.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

SongGLM: Lyric-to-Melody Generation with 2D Alignment Encoding and Multi-Task Pre-Training

Jiaxing Yu
Xinda Wu
Yunfei Xu
Tieyao Zhang
Songruoyao Wu
Le Ma
Kejun Zhang

Lyric-to-melody generation aims to automatically create melodies based on given lyrics, requiring the capture of complex and subtle correlations between them. However, previous works usually suffer from two main challenges: 1) lyric-melody alignment modeling, which is often simplified to one-syllable/word-to-one-note alignment, while others have the problem of low alignment accuracy; 2) lyric-melody harmony modeling, which usually relies heavily on intermediates or strict rules, limiting model's capabilities and generative diversity. In this paper, we propose SongGLM, a lyric-to-melody generation system that leverages 2D alignment encoding and multi-task pre-training based on the General Language Model (GLM) to guarantee the alignment and harmony between lyrics and melodies. Specifically, 1) we introduce a unified symbolic song representation for lyrics and melodies with word-level and phrase-level (2D) alignment encoding to capture the lyric-melody alignment; 2) we design a multi-task pre-training framework with hierarchical blank infilling objectives (n-gram, phrase, and long span), and incorporate lyric-melody relationships into the extraction of harmonized n-grams to ensure the lyric-melody harmony. We also construct a large-scale lyric-melody paired dataset comprising over 200,000 English song pieces for pre-training and fine-tuning. The objective and subjective results indicate that SongGLM can generate melodies from lyrics with significant improvements in both alignment and harmony, outperforming all the previous baseline methods.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

End-to-end Learnable Clustering for Intent Learning in Recommendation

Yue Liu
Shihao Zhu
Jun Xia
Yingwei Ma
Jian Ma
Xinwang Liu
Shengju Yu
Kejun Zhang

Intent learning, which aims to learn users' intents for user understanding and item recommendation, has become a hot research spot in recent years. However, existing methods suffer from complex and cumbersome alternating optimization, limiting performance and scalability. To this end, we propose a novel intent learning method termed \underline{ELCRec}, by unifying behavior representation learning into an \underline{E}nd-to-end \underline{L}earnable \underline{C}lustering framework, for effective and efficient \underline{Rec}ommendation. Concretely, we encode user behavior sequences and initialize the cluster centers (latent intents) as learnable neurons. Then, we design a novel learnable clustering module to separate different cluster centers, thus decoupling users' complex intents. Meanwhile, it guides the network to learn intents from behaviors by forcing behavior embeddings close to cluster centers. This allows simultaneous optimization of recommendation and clustering via mini-batch data. Moreover, we propose intent-assisted contrastive learning by using cluster centers as self-supervision signals, further enhancing mutual promotion. Both experimental results and theoretical analyses demonstrate the superiority of ELCRec from six perspectives. Compared to the runner-up, ELCRec improves NDCG@5 by 8. 9\% and reduces computational costs by 22. 5\% on the Beauty dataset. Furthermore, due to the scalability and universal applicability, we deploy this method on the industrial recommendation system with 130 million page views and achieve promising results. The codes are available on GitHub\footnote{https: //github. com/yueliu1999/ELCRec}. A collection (papers, codes, datasets) of deep group recommendation/intent learning methods is available on GitHub\footnote{https: //github. com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Group-Recommendation}.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

MuChin: A Chinese Colloquial Description Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models in the Field of Music

Zihao Wang
Shuyu Li
Tao Zhang
Qi Wang
Pengfei Yu
Jinyang Luo
Yan Liu
Ming Xi

The rapidly evolving multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) urgently require new benchmarks to uniformly evaluate their performance on understanding and textually describing music. However, due to semantic gaps between Music Information Retrieval (MIR) algorithms and human understanding, discrepancies between professionals and the public, and low precision of annotations, existing music description datasets cannot serve as benchmarks. To this end, we present MuChin, the first open-source music description benchmark in Chinese colloquial language, designed to evaluate the performance of multimodal LLMs in understanding and describing music. We established the Caichong Music Annotation Platform (CaiMAP) that employs an innovative multi-person, multi-stage assurance method, and recruited both amateurs and professionals to ensure the precision of annotations and alignment with popular semantics. Utilizing this method, we built a large-scale, private dataset with multi-dimensional, high-precision music annotations, the Caichong Music Dataset (CaiMD), and carefully selected 1, 000 high-quality entries to serve as the test set for MuChin. Based on MuChin, we analyzed the discrepancies between professionals and amateurs in terms of music description, and empirically demonstrated the effectiveness of CaiMD for fine-tuning LLMs. Ultimately, we employed MuChin to evaluate existing music understanding models on their ability to provide colloquial descriptions of music.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

UWSpeech: Speech to Speech Translation for Unwritten Languages

Chen Zhang
Xu Tan
Yi Ren
Tao Qin
Kejun Zhang
Tie-Yan Liu

Existing speech to speech translation systems heavily rely on the text of target language: they usually translate source language either to target text and then synthesize target speech from text, or directly to target speech with target text for auxiliary training. However, those methods cannot be applied to unwritten target languages, which have no written text or phoneme available. In this paper, we develop a translation system for unwritten languages, named as UWSpeech, which converts target unwritten speech into discrete tokens with a converter, and then translates source-language speech into target discrete tokens with a translator, and finally synthesizes target speech from target discrete tokens with an inverter. We propose a method called XL-VAE, which enhances vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) with cross-lingual (XL) speech recognition, to train the converter and inverter of UWSpeech jointly. Experiments on Fisher Spanish-English conversation translation dataset show that UWSpeech outperforms direct translation and VQ-VAE baseline by about 16 and 10 BLEU points respectively, which demonstrate the advantages and potentials of UWSpeech.

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ICRA Conference 2005 Conference Paper

On Sensor Management of Calligraphic Robot

Kejun Zhang
Jianbo Su

Development of calligraphic robot is motivated by allowing humanoid robot and home service robot to mimic the writing skills of human beings. Similar to human beings, versatile sensors are involved in writing procedure of robot to percept stages of task fulfillment and status of writing-brush. It is well known that the structures of Chinese characters are very complex and delicate. The writing-brush is soft and can draw strokes of different and variable widths, which makes Chinese calligraphy a sort of art like painting. Since the relations of strokes of Chinese characters are complicated and the writing-brush is extremely intricate to handle that it might result in inconsistent strokes with even slight changes in environment, dynamic management of sensors is hence a critical issue for a successful writing of an elegant Chinese character. This paper presents a sensor management method based on fuzzy decision tree (FDT), with which necessary prerequisite knowledge of Chinese character writing can be integrated into control of calligraphic robot system. Properties of sensor management problem in calligraphic robot are analyzed. Implementation of the proposed method is discussed. Experiments evaluate the feasibility and advantages of the proposed method.

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