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Michael Zeng

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9 papers

1 author row

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

CoVoMix: Advancing Zero-Shot Speech Generation for Human-like Multi-talker Conversations

Leying Zhang
Yao Qian
Long Zhou
Shujie Liu
Dongmei Wang
Xiaofei Wang
Midia Yousefi
Yanmin Qian

Recent advancements in zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) modeling have led to significant strides in generating high-fidelity and diverse speech. However, dialogue generation, along with achieving human-like naturalness in speech, continues to be a challenge. In this paper, we introduce CoVoMix: Conversational Voice Mixture Generation, a novel model for zero-shot, human-like, multi-speaker, multi-round dialogue speech generation. CoVoMix first converts dialogue text into multiple streams of discrete tokens, with each token stream representing semantic information for individual talkers. These token streams are then fed into a flow-matching based acoustic model to generate mixed mel-spectrograms. Finally, the speech waveforms are produced using a HiFi-GAN model. Furthermore, we devise a comprehensive set of metrics for measuring the effectiveness of dialogue modeling and generation. Our experimental results show that CoVoMix can generate dialogues that are not only human-like in their naturalness and coherence but also involve multiple talkers engaging in multiple rounds of conversation. This is exemplified by instances generated in a single channel where one speaker's utterance is seamlessly mixed with another's interjections or laughter, indicating the latter's role as an attentive listener. Audio samples are enclosed in the supplementary.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

TransVIP: Speech to Speech Translation System with Voice and Isochrony Preservation

Chenyang Le
Yao Qian
Dongmei Wang
Long Zhou
Shujie Liu
Xiaofei Wang
Midia Yousefi
Yanmin Qian

There is a rising interest and trend in research towards directly translating speech from one language to another, known as end-to-end speech-to-speech translation. However, most end-to-end models struggle to outperform cascade models, i. e. , a pipeline framework by concatenating speech recognition, machine translation and text-to-speech models. The primary challenges stem from the inherent complexities involved in direct translation tasks and the scarcity of data. In this study, we introduce a novel model framework TransVIP that leverages diverse datasets in a cascade fashion yet facilitates end-to-end inference through joint probability. Furthermore, we propose two separated encoders to preserve the speaker’s voice characteristics and isochrony from the source speech during the translation process, making it highly suitable for scenarios such as video dubbing. Our experiments on the French-English language pair demonstrate that our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art speech-to-speech translation model.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Any-to-Any Generation via Composable Diffusion

Zineng Tang
Ziyi Yang
Chenguang Zhu
Michael Zeng
Mohit Bansal

We present Composable Diffusion (CoDi), a novel generative model capable of generating any combination of output modalities, such as language, image, video, or audio, from any combination of input modalities. Unlike existing generative AI systems, CoDi can generate multiple modalities in parallel and its input is not limited to a subset of modalities like text or image. Despite the absence of training datasets for many combinations of modalities, we propose to align modalities in both the input and output space. This allows CoDi to freely condition on any input combination and generate any group of modalities, even if they are not present in the training data. CoDi employs a novel composable generation strategy which involves building a shared multimodal space by bridging alignment in the diffusion process, enabling the synchronized generation of intertwined modalities, such as temporally aligned video and audio. Highly customizable and flexible, CoDi achieves strong joint-modality generation quality, and outperforms or is on par with the unimodal state-of-the-art for single-modality synthesis.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

ComSL: A Composite Speech-Language Model for End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation

Chenyang Le
Yao Qian
Long Zhou
Shujie Liu
Yanmin Qian
Michael Zeng
Xuedong Huang

Joint speech-language training is challenging due to the large demand for training data and GPU consumption, as well as the modality gap between speech and language. We present ComSL, a speech-language model built atop a composite architecture of public pre-trained speech-only and language-only models and optimized data-efficiently for spoken language tasks. Particularly, we propose to incorporate cross-modality learning into transfer learning and conduct them simultaneously for downstream tasks in a multi-task learning manner. Our approach has demonstrated effectiveness in end-to-end speech-to-text translation tasks, achieving a new state-of-the-art average BLEU score of 31. 5 on the multilingual speech to English text translation task for 21 languages, as measured on the public CoVoST2 evaluation set.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

i-Code: An Integrative and Composable Multimodal Learning Framework

Ziyi Yang
Yuwei Fang
Chenguang Zhu
Reid Pryzant
DongDong Chen
Yu Shi
Yichong Xu
Yao Qian

Human intelligence is multimodal; we integrate visual, linguistic, and acoustic signals to maintain a holistic worldview. Most current pretraining methods, however, are limited to one or two modalities. We present i-Code, a self-supervised pretraining framework where users may flexibly combine the modalities of vision, speech, and language into unified and general-purpose vector representations. In this framework, data from each modality are first given to pretrained single-modality encoders. The encoder outputs are then integrated with a multimodal fusion network, which uses novel merge- and co-attention mechanisms to effectively combine information from the different modalities. The entire system is pretrained end-to-end with new objectives including masked modality unit modeling and cross-modality contrastive learning. Unlike previous research using only video for pretraining, the i-Code framework can dynamically process single, dual, and triple-modality data during training and inference, flexibly projecting different combinations of modalities into a single representation space. Experimental results demonstrate how i-Code can outperform state-of-the-art techniques on five multimodal understanding tasks and single-modality benchmarks, improving by as much as 11% and demonstrating the power of integrative multimodal pretraining.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

DialogLM: Pre-trained Model for Long Dialogue Understanding and Summarization

Ming Zhong
Yang Liu
Yichong Xu
Chenguang Zhu
Michael Zeng

Dialogue is an essential part of human communication and cooperation. Existing research mainly focuses on short dialogue scenarios in a one-on-one fashion. However, multiperson interactions in the real world, such as meetings or interviews, are frequently over a few thousand words. There is still a lack of corresponding research and powerful tools to understand and process such long dialogues. Therefore, in this work, we present a pre-training framework for long dialogue understanding and summarization. Considering the nature of long conversations, we propose a window-based denoising approach for generative pre-training. For a dialogue, it corrupts a window of text with dialogue-inspired noise, and guides the model to reconstruct this window based on the content of the remaining conversation. Furthermore, to process longer input, we augment the model with sparse attention which is combined with conventional attention in a hybrid manner. We conduct extensive experiments on five datasets of long dialogues, covering tasks of dialogue summarization, abstractive question answering and topic segmentation. Experimentally, we show that our pre-trained model DIALOGLM significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art models across datasets and tasks. Source code and all the pretrained models are available on our GitHub repository (https: //github. com/microsoft/DialogLM).

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IJCAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Human Parity on CommonsenseQA: Augmenting Self-Attention with External Attention

Yichong Xu
Chenguang Zhu
Shuohang Wang
Siqi Sun
Hao Cheng
Xiaodong Liu
Jianfeng Gao
Pengcheng He

Most of today's AI systems focus on using self-attention mechanisms and transformer architectures on large amounts of diverse data to achieve impressive performance gains. In this paper, we propose to augment the transformer architecture with an external attention mechanism to bring external knowledge and context to bear. By integrating external information into the prediction process, we hope to reduce the need for ever-larger models and increase the democratization of AI systems. We find that the proposed external attention mechanism can significantly improve the performance of existing AI systems, allowing practitioners to easily customize foundation AI models to many diverse downstream applications. In particular, we focus on the task of Commonsense Reasoning, demonstrating that the proposed external attention mechanism can augment existing transformer models and significantly improve the model's reasoning capabilities. The proposed system, Knowledgeable External Attention for commonsense Reasoning (KEAR), reaches human parity on the open CommonsenseQA research benchmark with an accuracy of 89. 4% in comparison to the human accuracy of 88. 9%.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

JAKET: Joint Pre-training of Knowledge Graph and Language Understanding

Donghan Yu
Chenguang Zhu
Yiming Yang
Michael Zeng

Knowledge graphs (KGs) contain rich information about world knowledge, entities, and relations. Thus, they can be great supplements to existing pre-trained language models. However, it remains a challenge to efficiently integrate information from KG into language modeling. And the understanding of a knowledge graph requires related context. We propose a novel joint pre-training framework, JAKET, to model both the knowledge graph and language. The knowledge module and language module provide essential information to mutually assist each other: the knowledge module produces embeddings for entities in text while the language module generates context-aware initial embeddings for entities and relations in the graph. Our design enables the pre-trained model to easily adapt to unseen knowledge graphs in new domains. Experiment results on several knowledge-aware NLP tasks show that our proposed framework achieves superior performance by effectively leveraging knowledge in language understanding.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Visual Clues: Bridging Vision and Language Foundations for Image Paragraph Captioning

Yujia Xie
Luowei Zhou
Xiyang Dai
Lu Yuan
Nguyen Bach
Ce Liu
Michael Zeng

People say, "A picture is worth a thousand words". Then how can we get the rich information out of the image? We argue that by using visual clues to bridge large pretrained vision foundation models and language models, we can do so without any extra cross-modal training. Thanks to the strong zero-shot capability of foundation models, we start by constructing a rich semantic representation of the image (e. g. , image tags, object attributes / locations, captions) as a structured textual prompt, called visual clues, using a vision foundation model. Based on visual clues, we use large language model to produce a series of comprehensive descriptions for the visual content, which is then verified by the vision model again to select the candidate that aligns best with the image. We evaluate the quality of generated descriptions by quantitative and qualitative measurement. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of such a structured semantic representation.

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