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Qifeng Liu

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12 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

VividListener: Expressive and Controllable Listener Dynamics Modeling for Multi-Modal Responsive Interaction

Shiying Li
Xingqun Qi
Bingkun Yang
Weile Chen
Zezhao Tian
Muyi Sun
Qifeng Liu
Man Zhang

Generating responsive listener head dynamics with nuanced emotions and expressive reactions is crucial for dialogue modeling in various virtual avatar animations. Previous studies mainly focus on the direct short-term production of listener behavior. They overlook the fine-grained control over motion variations and emotional intensity, especially in long-sequence modeling. Moreover, the lack of long-term and large-scale paired speaker-listener corpora incorporating head dynamics and fine-grained multi-modality annotations limits the application of dialogue modeling. Therefore, we first newly collect a large-scale multi-turn dataset of 3D dyadic conversation containing more than 1.4M valid frames for multi-modal responsive interaction, dubbed ListenerX. Additionally, we propose VividListener, a novel framework enabling fine-grained, expressive, and controllable listener dynamics modeling. This framework leverages multi-modal conditions as guiding principles for fostering coherent interactions between speakers and listeners. Specifically, we design the Responsive Interaction Module (RIM) to adaptively represent the multi-modal interactive embeddings. RIM ensures the listener dynamics achieve fine-grained semantic coordination with textual descriptions and adjustments, while preserving expressive reaction with speaker behavior. Meanwhile, we propose the Emotional Intensity Tags (EIT) for emotion intensity editing with multi-modal information integration, applying to both text descriptions and listener motion amplitude. Extensive experiments conducted on our newly collected ListenerX dataset demonstrate that VividListener achieves state-of-the-art performance, realizing expressive and controllable listener dynamics.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Co3Gesture: Towards Coherent Concurrent Co-speech 3D Gesture Generation with Interactive Diffusion

Xingqun Qi
Yatian Wang
Hengyuan Zhang
Jiahao Pan
Wei Xue 0002
Shanghang Zhang
Wenhan Luo
Qifeng Liu

Generating gestures from human speech has gained tremendous progress in animating virtual avatars. While the existing methods enable synthesizing gestures cooperated by people self-talking, they overlook the practicality of concurrent gesture modeling with two-person interactive conversations. Moreover, the lack of high-quality datasets with concurrent co-speech gestures also limits handling this issue. To fulfill this goal, we first construct a large-scale concurrent co-speech gesture dataset that contains more than 7M frames for diverse two-person interactive posture sequences, dubbed $\textbf{GES-Inter}$. Moreover, we propose Co$^{\mathbf{3}}$Gesture, a novel framework that enables concurrent coherent co-speech gesture synthesis including two-person interactive movements. Our framework is built upon two cooperative generation branches conditioned on decomposed speaker audio. Specifically, to enhance the coordination of human postures w.r.t corresponding speaker audios while interacting with the conversational partner, we present a Temporal-Interaction Module ($\textbf{TIM}$). TIM can effectively model the temporal association representation between two speakers' gesture sequences as interaction guidance and fuse it into the concurrent gesture generation. Then, we devise a mutual attention mechanism to further boost learning dependencies of interacted concurrent motions, thereby enabling us to generate vivid and coherent gestures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on our newly collected GES-Inter dataset.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Codec Does Matter: Exploring the Semantic Shortcoming of Codec for Audio Language Model

Zhen Ye
Peiwen Sun
Jiahe Lei
Hongzhan Lin
Xu Tan
Zheqi Dai
Qiuqiang Kong
Jianyi Chen

Recent advancements in audio generation have been significantly propelled by the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The existing research on audio LLM has primarily focused on enhancing the architecture and scale of audio language models, as well as leveraging larger datasets, and generally, acoustic codecs, such as EnCodec, are used for audio tokenization. However, these codecs were originally designed for audio compression, which may lead to suboptimal performance in the context of audio LLM. Our research aims to address the shortcomings of current audio LLM codecs, particularly their challenges in maintaining semantic integrity in generated audio. For instance, existing methods like VALL-E, which condition acoustic token generation on text transcriptions, often suffer from content inaccuracies and elevated word error rates (WER) due to semantic misinterpretations of acoustic tokens, resulting in word skipping and errors. To overcome these issues, we propose a straightforward yet effective approach called X-Codec. X-Codec incorporates semantic features from a pre-trained semantic encoder before the Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) stage and introduces a semantic reconstruction loss after RVQ. By enhancing the semantic ability of the codec, X-Codec significantly reduces WER in speech synthesis tasks and extends these benefits to non-speech applications, including music and sound generation. Our experiments in text-to-speech, music continuation, and text-to-sound tasks demonstrate that integrating semantic information substantially improves the overall performance of language models in audio generation.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Empowering World Models with Reflection for Embodied Video Prediction

Xiaowei Chi
Chun-Kai Fan
Hengyuan Zhang
Xingqun Qi
Rongyu Zhang
Anthony Chen
Chi-Min Chan
Wei Xue 0002

Video generation models have made significant progress in simulating future states, showcasing their potential as world simulators in embodied scenarios. However, existing models often lack robust understanding, limiting their ability to perform multi-step predictions or handle Out-of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose the Reflection of Generation (RoG), a set of intermediate reasoning strategies designed to enhance video prediction. It leverages the complementary strengths of pre-trained vision-language and video generation models, enabling them to function as a world model in embodied scenarios. To support RoG, we introduce Embodied Video Anticipation Benchmark(EVA-Bench), a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates embodied world models across diverse tasks and scenarios, utilizing both in-domain and OOD datasets. Building on this foundation, we devise a world model, Embodied Video Anticipator (EVA), that follows a multistage training paradigm to generate high-fidelity video frames and apply an autoregressive strategy to enable adaptive generalization for longer video sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of EVA in various downstream tasks like video generation and robotics, thereby paving the way for large-scale pre-trained models in real-world video prediction applications. The video demos are available at https: //sites. google. com/view/icml-eva.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Importance Weighting Can Help Large Language Models Self-Improve

Chunyang Jiang
Chi-Min Chan
Wei Xue
Qifeng Liu
Yike Guo

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capability in numerous tasks and applications. However, fine-tuning LLMs using high-quality datasets under external supervision remains prohibitively expensive. In response, LLM self-improvement approaches have been vibrantly developed recently. The typical paradigm of LLM self-improvement involves training LLM on self-generated data, part of which may be detrimental and should be filtered out due to the unstable data quality. While current works primarily employs filtering strategies based on answer correctness, in this paper, we demonstrate that filtering out correct but with high distribution shift extent (DSE) samples could also benefit the results of self-improvement. Given that the actual sample distribution is usually inaccessible, we propose a new metric called DS weight to approximate DSE, inspired by the Importance Weighting methods. Consequently, we integrate DS weight with self-consistency to comprehensively filter the self-generated samples and fine-tune the language model. Experiments show that with only a tiny valid set (up to 5% size of the training set) to compute DS weight, our approach can notably promote the reasoning ability of current LLM self-improvement methods. The resulting performance is on par with methods that rely on external supervision from pre-trained reward models.

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EAAI Journal 2025 Journal Article

Spectrum prior-based and visibility fusion method for underwater image enhancement

Qifeng Liu
Xin Yan
Lu Shen
Qiang Li

When light propagates in water, it undergoes scattering and absorption phenomena, which typically result in haze, high blur, low contrast and color distortion, making it extremely challenging to obtain high-quality images. To address these issues, many existing methods target image enhancement by correcting specific aspects such as color shift or contrast. However, challenges like poor visibility and low-light conditions are often overlooked. In this paper, we proposed a spectrum prior-based and visibility fusion method (SPV) to enhance underwater images in terms of color, contrast, and visibility. Unlike existing methods, SPV complements the advantages of both physical and non-physical models, comprehensively addressing the problems of reduced visual visibility, color distortion, and low contrast caused by low-light environments, thereby significantly improving the overall image quality. We proposed a dehazing module based on spectral information priors, which reliably restores image quality under complex water conditions. Additionally, we introduced a color correction module based on human color perception and employed morphological operations, effectively solving the issues of color shift and unclear contours in underwater images. Furthermore, we proposed a visibility enhancement module based on the fuzzy c-means clustering method to improve image contrast and visibility, particularly under low-light conditions. Finally, through a detail enhancement fusion module, we simultaneously addressed problems related to color shift, low contrast, and low visibility. SPV showed excellent performance in application tests including feature point matching, geometric rotation estimation, and edge detection. Comparative experiments on four real underwater datasets against 14 advanced enhancement methods demonstrated promising results.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

DetKDS: Knowledge Distillation Search for Object Detectors

Lujun Li 0001
Yufan Bao
Peijie Dong
Chuanguang Yang
Anggeng Li
Wenhan Luo
Qifeng Liu
Wei Xue 0002

In this paper, we present DetKDS, the first framework that searches for optimal detection distillation policies. Manual design of detection distillers becomes challenging and time-consuming due to significant disparities in distillation behaviors between detectors with different backbones, paradigms, and label assignments. To tackle these challenges, we leverage search algorithms to discover optimal distillers for homogeneous and heterogeneous student-teacher pairs. Firstly, our search space encompasses global features, foreground-background features, instance features, logits response, and localization response as inputs. Then, we construct omni-directional cascaded transformations and obtain the distiller by selecting the advanced distance function and common weight value options. Finally, we present a divide-and-conquer evolutionary algorithm to handle the explosion of the search space. In this strategy, we first evolve the best distiller formulations of individual knowledge inputs and then optimize the combined weights of these multiple distillation losses. DetKDS automates the distillation process without requiring expert design or additional tuning, effectively reducing the teacher-student gap in various scenarios. Based on the analysis of our search results, we provide valuable guidance that contributes to detection distillation designs. Comprehensive experiments on different detectors demonstrate that DetKDS outperforms state-of-the-art methods in detection and instance segmentation tasks. For instance, DetKDS achieves significant gains than baseline detectors: $+3. 7$, $+4. 1$, $+4. 0$, $+3. 7$, and $+3. 5$ AP on RetinaNet, Faster-RCNN, FCOS, RepPoints, and GFL, respectively. Code at: https: //github. com/lliai/DetKDS.

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UAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Dirichlet Continual Learning: Tackling Catastrophic Forgetting in NLP

Min Zeng
Haiqin Yang
Wei Xue 0002
Qifeng Liu
Yike Guo

Catastrophic forgetting poses a significant challenge in continual learning (CL). In the context of Natural Language Processing, generative-based rehearsal CL methods have made progress in avoiding expensive retraining. However, generating pseudo samples that accurately capture the task-specific distribution remains a daunting task. In this paper, we propose Dirichlet Continual Learning (DCL), a novel generative-based rehearsal strategy designed specifically for CL. Different from the conventional use of Gaussian latent variable in Conditional Variational Autoencoder, DCL employs the flexibility of the Dirichlet distribution to model the latent variable. This allows DCL to effectively capture sentence-level features from previous tasks and guide the generation of pseudo samples. Additionally, we introduce Jensen-Shannon Knowledge Distillation, a robust logit-based knowledge distillation method that enhances knowledge transfer during pseudo-sample generation. Our extensive experiments show that DCL outperforms state-of-the-art methods in two typical tasks of task-oriented dialogue systems, demonstrating its efficacy.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Discovering Sparsity Allocation for Layer-wise Pruning of Large Language Models

Lujun Li
Peijie Dong
Zhenheng Tang
Xiang Liu
Qiang Wang
Wenhan Luo
Wei Xue
Qifeng Liu

In this paper, we present DSA, the first automated framework for discovering sparsity allocation schemes for layer-wise pruning in Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs have become increasingly powerful, but their large parameter counts make them computationally expensive. Existing pruning methods for compressing LLMs primarily focus on evaluating redundancies and removing element-wise weights. However, these methods fail to allocate adaptive layer-wise sparsities, leading to performance degradation in challenging tasks. We observe that per-layer importance statistics can serve as allocation indications, but their effectiveness depends on the allocation function between layers. To address this issue, we develop an expression discovery framework to explore potential allocation strategies. Our allocation functions involve two steps: reducing element-wise metrics to per-layer importance scores, and modelling layer importance to sparsity ratios. To search for the most effective allocation function, we construct a search space consisting of pre-process, reduction, transform, and post-process operations. We leverage an evolutionary algorithm to perform crossover and mutation on superior candidates within the population, guided by performance evaluation. Finally, we seamlessly integrate our discovered functions into various uniform methods, resulting in significant performance improvements. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple challenging tasks such as arithmetic, knowledge reasoning, and multimodal benchmarks spanning GSM8K, MMLU, SQA, and VQA, demonstrating that our DSA method achieves significant performance gains on the LLaMA-1|2|3, Mistral, and OPT models. Notably, the LLaMA-1|2|3 model pruned by our DSA reaches 4. 73\%|6. 18\%|10. 65\% gain over the state-of-the-art techniques (e. g. , Wanda and SparseGPT).

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Era3D: High-Resolution Multiview Diffusion using Efficient Row-wise Attention

Peng Li
Yuan Liu
Xiaoxiao Long
Feihu Zhang
Cheng Lin
Mengfei Li
Xingqun Qi
Shanghang Zhang

In this paper, we introduce Era3D, a novel multiview diffusion method that generates high-resolution multiview images from a single-view image. Despite significant advancements in multiview generation, existing methods still suffer from camera prior mismatch, inefficacy, and low resolution, resulting in poor-quality multiview images. Specifically, these methods assume that the input images should comply with a predefined camera type, e. g. a perspective camera with a fixed focal length, leading to distorted shapes when the assumption fails. Moreover, the full-image or dense multiview attention they employ leads to a dramatic explosion of computational complexity as image resolution increases, resulting in prohibitively expensive training costs. To bridge the gap between assumption and reality, Era3D first proposes a diffusion-based camera prediction module to estimate the focal length and elevation of the input image, which allows our method to generate images without shape distortions. Furthermore, a simple but efficient attention layer, named row-wise attention, is used to enforce epipolar priors in the multiview diffusion, facilitating efficient cross-view information fusion. Consequently, compared with state-of-the-art methods, Era3D generates high-quality multiview images with up to a 512×512 resolution while reducing computation complexity of multiview attention by 12x times. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior generation power of Era3D- it can reconstruct high-quality and detailed 3D meshes from diverse single-view input images, significantly outperforming baseline multiview diffusion methods.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

FastSAG: Towards Fast Non-Autoregressive Singing Accompaniment Generation

Jianyi Chen
Wei Xue
Xu Tan
Zhen Ye
Qifeng Liu
Yike Guo

Singing Accompaniment Generation (SAG), which generates instrumental music to accompany input vocals, is crucial to developing human-AI symbiotic art creation systems. The state-of-the-art method, SingSong, utilizes a multi-stage autoregressive (AR) model for SAG, however, this method is extremely slow as it generates semantic and acoustic tokens recursively, and this makes it impossible for real-time applications. In this paper, we aim to develop a Fast SAG method that can create high-quality and coherent accompaniments. A non-AR diffusion-based framework is developed, which by carefully designing the conditions inferred from the vocal signals, generates the Mel spectrogram of the target accompaniment directly. With diffusion and Mel spectrogram modeling, the proposed method significantly simplifies the AR token-based SingSong framework, and largely accelerates the generation. We also design semantic projection, prior projection blocks as well as a set of loss functions, to ensure the generated accompaniment has semantic and rhythm coherence with the vocal signal. By intensive experimental studies, we demonstrate that the proposed method can generate better samples than SingSong, and accelerate the generation by at least 30 times. Audio samples and code are available at this link.

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IJCAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

NAS-FM: Neural Architecture Search for Tunable and Interpretable Sound Synthesis Based on Frequency Modulation

Zhen Ye
Wei Xue
Xu Tan
Qifeng Liu
Yike Guo

Developing digital sound synthesizers is crucial to the music industry as it provides a low-cost way to produce high-quality sounds with rich timbres. Existing traditional synthesizers often require substantial expertise to determine the overall framework of a synthesizer and the parameters of submodules. Since expert knowledge is hard to acquire, it hinders the flexibility to quickly design and tune digital synthesizers for diverse sounds. In this paper, we propose ``NAS-FM'', which adopts neural architecture search (NAS) to build a differentiable frequency modulation (FM) synthesizer. Tunable synthesizers with interpretable controls can be developed automatically from sounds without any prior expert knowledge and manual operating costs. In detail, we train a supernet with a specifically designed search space, including predicting the envelopes of carriers and modulators with different frequency ratios. An evolutionary search algorithm with adaptive oscillator size is then developed to find the optimal relationship between oscillators and the frequency ratio of FM. Extensive experiments on recordings of different instrument sounds show that our algorithm can build a synthesizer fully automatically, achieving better results than handcrafted synthesizers. Audio samples are available at https: //nas-fm. github. io/

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