Author name cluster

Zhiyong Wu

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

18 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

DualSpeechLM: Towards Unified Speech Understanding and Generation via Dual Speech Token Modeling with Large Language Models

Yuanyuan Wang
Dongchao Yang
Yiwen Shao
Hangting Chen
Jiankun Zhao
Zhiyong Wu
Helen Meng
Xixin Wu

Extending pre-trained text Large Language Models (LLMs)’s speech understanding or generation abilities by introducing various effective speech tokens has attracted great attention in the speech research community. However, building a unified speech understanding and generation model still faces the following challenges: (1) Due to the huge modality gap between speech and text tokens, extending text LLMs to unified speech LLMs relies on large-scale paired data for fine-tuning, and (2) Generation and understanding tasks prefer information at different levels, e.g., generation benefits from detailed acoustic features, while understanding favors high-level semantics. This divergence leads to difficult performance optimization in one unified model. To solve these challenges, in this paper, we present two key insights in speech tokenization and speech language modeling. Specifically, we first propose an Understanding-driven Speech Tokenizer (USTokenizer), which extracts high-level semantic information essential for accomplishing understanding tasks using text LLMs. In this way, USToken enjoys better modality commonality with text, which reduces the difficulty of modality alignment in adapting text LLMs to speech LLMs. Secondly, we present DualSpeechLM, a dual-token modeling framework that concurrently models USToken as input and acoustic token as output within a unified, end-to-end framework, seamlessly integrating speech understanding and generation capabilities. Furthermore, we propose a novel semantic supervision loss and a Chain-of-Condition (CoC) strategy to stabilize model training and enhance speech generation performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach effectively fosters a complementary relationship between understanding and generation tasks, highlighting the promising strategy of mutually enhancing both tasks in one unified model.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Human-Centric Video Generation via Collaborative Multi-Modal Conditioning

Liyang Chen
Tianxiang Ma
Jiawei Liu
Bingchuan Li
Zhuowei Chen
Lijie Liu
Xu He
Gen Li

Human-Centric Video Generation (HCVG) methods seek to synthesize human videos from multimodal inputs, including text, images, and audio. Existing methods struggle to effectively coordinate these heterogeneous modalities due to two challenges: the scarcity of modality-complete data and the difficulty of jointly modeling triplet conditions without performance degradation. In this work, we present HuMo, a unified HCVG framework for collaborative multimodal control. For the first challenge, we construct an incomplete-yet-complementary dataset for improved data utilization efficiency and training scalability. For the second challenge, we propose a two-stage progressive multimodal training paradigm with task-specific strategies at each stage. In the first stage, to balance the text-following and subject-preservation abilities, we adopt the minimal-invasive image injection strategy. In the second stage, to enhance audio-visual sync, we propose a focus-by-predicting strategy that implicitly guides the model to associate audio with facial regions. For joint learning of controllabilities across multi-modal inputs, we progressively incorporate the audio-visual sync task, building on previously acquired capabilities. During inference, for flexible and fine-grained multimodal control, we design a stage-adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance strategy that dynamically adjusts guidance weights across denoising steps. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HuMo surpasses specialized state-of-the-art methods in sub-tasks, establishing a unified framework for collaborative multimodal-conditioned HCVG.

PDF Details DOI

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

E2E-VGuard: Adversarial Prevention for Production LLM-based End-To-End Speech Synthesis

Zhisheng Zhang
Derui Wang
Yifan Mi
Zhiyong Wu
Jie Gao
Yuxin Cao
Kai Ye
Minhui Xue

Recent advancements in speech synthesis technology have enriched our daily lives, with high-quality and human-like audio widely adopted across real-world applications. However, malicious exploitation like voice-cloning fraud poses severe security risks. Existing defense techniques struggle to address the production large language model (LLM)-based speech synthesis. While previous studies have considered the protection for fine-tuning synthesizers, they assume manually annotated transcripts. Given the labor intensity of manual annotation, end-to-end (E2E) systems leveraging automatic speech recognition (ASR) to generate transcripts are becoming increasingly prevalent, e. g. , voice cloning via commercial APIs. Therefore, this E2E speech synthesis also requires new security mechanisms. To tackle these challenges, we propose E2E-VGuard, a proactive defense framework for two emerging threats: (1) production LLM-based speech synthesis, and (2) the novel attack arising from ASR-driven E2E scenarios. Specifically, we employ the encoder ensemble with a feature extractor to protect timbre, while ASR-targeted adversarial examples disrupt pronunciation. Moreover, we incorporate the psychoacoustic model to ensure perturbative imperceptibility. For a comprehensive evaluation, we test 16 open-source synthesizers and 3 commercial APIs across Chinese and English datasets, confirming E2E-VGuard's effectiveness in timbre and pronunciation protection. Real-world deployment validation is also conducted. Our code and demo page are available at https: //wxzyd123. github. io/e2e-vguard/.

PDF Details

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

LeVo: High-Quality Song Generation with Multi-Preference Alignment

Shun Lei
Yaoxun Xu
Huaicheng Zhang
Wei Tan
Hangting Chen
Yixuan Zhang
Chenyu Yang
Haina Zhu

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and audio language models have significantly improved music generation, particularly in lyrics-to-song generation. However, existing approaches still struggle with the complex composition of songs and the scarcity of high-quality data, leading to limitations in audio quality, musicality, instruction following, and vocal-instrument harmony. To address these challenges, we introduce LeVo, a language model based framework consisting of LeLM and Music Codec. LeLM is capable of parallel modeling of two types of tokens: mixed tokens, which represent the combined audio of vocals and accompaniment to achieve better vocal-instrument harmony, and dual-track tokens, which separately encode vocals and accompaniment for high-quality song generation. It employs two decoder-only transformers and a modular extension training strategy to prevent interference between different token types. To further enhance musicality and instruction following ability, we introduce a multi-preference alignment method based on Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). This method handles diverse human preferences through a semi-automatic data construction process and post-training. Experimental results demonstrate that LeVo significantly outperforms existing open-source methods in both objective and subjective metrics, while performing competitively with industry systems. Ablation studies further justify the effectiveness of our designs. Audio examples and source code are available at https: //levo-demo. github. io and https: //github. com/tencent-ailab/songgeneration.

PDF Details

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

MagicMan: Generative Novel View Synthesis of Humans with 3D-Aware Diffusion and Iterative Refinement

Xu He
Zhiyong Wu
Xiaoyu Li
Di Kang
Chaopeng Zhang
Jiangnan Ye
Liyang Chen
Xiangjun Gao

Existing works in single-image human reconstruction suffer from weak generalizability due to insufficient training data or 3D inconsistencies for a lack of comprehensive multi-view knowledge. In this paper, we introduce MagicMan, a human-specific multi-view diffusion model to generate high-quality novel views from a single reference image. As its core, we leverage a pre-trained 2D diffusion model as the generative prior for generalizability, with the parametric SMPL-X model as the 3D body prior to promote 3D awareness. To maintain consistency while generating denser views for improved 3D human reconstruction, we introduce hybrid multi-view attention to facilitate efficient and thorough information interchange across views. Besides, we present a geometry-aware dual branch to perform concurrent generation in both RGB and normal domains, further enhancing consistency via geometry cues. Last but not least, to address ill-shaped issues arising from inaccurate SMPL-X estimation, we propose a novel iterative refinement strategy, which progressively optimizes SMPL-X accuracy while enhancing the quality and consistency of the generated multi-views. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in both novel view synthesis and subsequent 3D human reconstruction tasks.

PDF Details DOI

IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

VideoHumanMIB: Unlocking Appearance Decoupling for Video Human Motion In-betweening

Haiwei Xue
Zhensong Zhang
Minglei Li
Zonghong Dai
Fei Yu
Fei Ma
Zhiyong Wu

We propose VideoHumanMIB, a novel framework for Video Human Motion In-betweening that enables seamless transitions between different motion video clips, facilitating the generation of longer and more natural digital human videos. While existing video frame interpolation methods work well for similar motions in adjacent frames, they often struggle with complex human movements, resulting in artifacts and unrealistic transitions. To address these challenges, we introduce a two-stage approach: First, we design an Appearance Reconstruction AutoEncoder to decouple appearance and motion information, extracting robust appearance-invariant features. Second, we develop an enhanced diffusion pretrained network that leverages both motion optical flow and human pose as guidance conditions, enabling the model to learn comprehensive latent distributions of possible motions. Rather than operating directly in pixel space, our model works in a learned latent space, allowing it to better capture the underlying motion dynamics. The framework is optimized with a dual-frame constraint loss and a motion flow loss to ensure temporal consistency and natural movement transitions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach generates highly realistic transition sequences that significantly outperform existing methods, particularly in challenging scenarios with large motion variations. The proposed VideoHumanMIB establishes a new baseline for human motion synthesis and enables more natural and controllable digital human animation.

PDF Details DOI

ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Emo: Earth Mover Distance Optimization for Auto-Regressive Language Modeling

Siyu Ren
Zhiyong Wu
Kenny Q. Zhu

Neural language models are probabilistic models of human text. They are predominantly trained using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), which is equivalent to minimizing the forward cross-entropy between the empirical data distribution and the model distribution. However, various degeneration phenomena are still widely observed when decoding from the distributions learned by such models. We establish that the forward cross-entropy is suboptimal as a distance metric for aligning human and model distribution due to its (1) recall-prioritization (2) negative diversity ignorance and (3) train-test mismatch. In this paper, we propose Earth Mover Distance Optimization (EMO) for auto-regressive language modeling. EMO capitalizes on the inherent properties of earth mover distance to address the aforementioned challenges. Due to the high complexity of direct computation, we further introduce a feasible upper bound for EMO to ease end-to-end training. Upon extensive evaluation of language models trained using EMO and MLE. We find that EMO demonstrates a consistently better language modeling performance than MLE across domains. Moreover, EMO demonstrates noteworthy enhancements in downstream performance with minimal fine-tuning on merely 25,000 sentences. This highlights the tremendous potential of EMO as a lightweight calibration method for enhancing large-scale pre-trained language models.

Details

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Explore 3D Dance Generation via Reward Model from Automatically-Ranked Demonstrations

Zilin Wang
Haolin Zhuang
Lu Li
Yinmin Zhang
Junjie Zhong
Jun Chen
Yu Yang
Boshi Tang

This paper presents an Exploratory 3D Dance generation framework, E3D2, designed to address the exploration capability deficiency in existing music-conditioned 3D dance generation models. Current models often generate monotonous and simplistic dance sequences that misalign with human preferences because they lack exploration capabilities.The E3D2 framework involves a reward model trained from automatically-ranked dance demonstrations, which then guides the reinforcement learning process. This approach encourages the agent to explore and generate high quality and diverse dance movement sequences. The soundness of the reward model is both theoretically and experimentally validated. Empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of E3D2 on the AIST++ dataset.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

SECap: Speech Emotion Captioning with Large Language Model

Yaoxun Xu
Hangting Chen
Jianwei Yu
Qiaochu Huang
Zhiyong Wu
Shi-Xiong Zhang
Guangzhi Li
Yi Luo

Speech emotions are crucial in human communication and are extensively used in fields like speech synthesis and natural language understanding. Most prior studies, such as speech emotion recognition, have categorized speech emotions into a fixed set of classes. Yet, emotions expressed in human speech are often complex, and categorizing them into predefined groups can be insufficient to adequately represent speech emotions. On the contrary, describing speech emotions directly by means of natural language may be a more effective approach. Regrettably, there are not many studies available that have focused on this direction. Therefore, this paper proposes a speech emotion captioning framework named SECap, aiming at effectively describing speech emotions using natural language. Owing to the impressive capabilities of large language models in language comprehension and text generation, SECap employs LLaMA as the text decoder to allow the production of coherent speech emotion captions. In addition, SECap leverages HuBERT as the audio encoder to extract general speech features and Q-Former as the Bridge-Net to provide LLaMA with emotion-related speech features. To accomplish this, Q-Former utilizes mutual information learning to disentangle emotion-related speech features and speech contents, while implementing contrastive learning to extract more emotion-related speech features. The results of objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that: 1) the SECap framework outperforms the HTSAT-BART baseline in all objective evaluations; 2) SECap can generate high-quality speech emotion captions that attain performance on par with human annotators in subjective mean opinion score tests.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

SimCalib: Graph Neural Network Calibration Based on Similarity between Nodes

Boshi Tang
Zhiyong Wu
Xixin Wu
Qiaochu Huang
Jun Chen
Shun Lei
Helen Meng

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have exhibited impressive performance in modeling graph data as exemplified in various applications. Recently, the GNN calibration problem has attracted increasing attention, especially in cost-sensitive scenarios. Previous work has gained empirical insights on the issue, and devised effective approaches for it, but theoretical supports still fall short. In this work, we shed light on the relationship between GNN calibration and nodewise similarity via theoretical analysis. A novel calibration framework, named SimCalib, is accordingly proposed to consider similarity between nodes at global and local levels. At the global level, the Mahalanobis distance between the current node and class prototypes is integrated to implicitly consider similarity between the current node and all nodes in the same class. At the local level, the similarity of node representation movement dynamics, quantified by nodewise homophily and relative degree, is considered. Informed about the application of nodewise movement patterns in analyzing nodewise behavior on the over-smoothing problem, we empirically present a possible relationship between over-smoothing and GNN calibration problem. Experimentally, we discover a correlation between nodewise similarity and model calibration improvement, in alignment with our theoretical results. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments investigating different design factors and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SimCalib framework for GNN calibration by achieving state-of-the-art performance on 14 out of 16 benchmarks.

PDF Details DOI

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

SongCreator: Lyrics-based Universal Song Generation

Shun Lei
Yixuan Zhou
Boshi Tang
Max W. Lam
Feng Liu
Hangyu Liu
Jingcheng Wu
Shiyin Kang

Music is an integral part of human culture, embodying human intelligence and creativity, of which songs compose an essential part. While various aspects of song generation have been explored by previous works, such as singing voice, vocal composition and instrumental arrangement, etc. , generating songs with both vocals and accompaniment given lyrics remains a significant challenge, hindering the application of music generation models in the real world. In this light, we propose SongCreator, a song-generation system designed to tackle this challenge. The model features two novel designs: a meticulously designed dual-sequence language model (DSLM) to capture the information of vocals and accompaniment for song generation, and a series of attention mask strategies for DSLM, which allows our model to understand, generate and edit songs, making it suitable for various songrelated generation tasks by utilizing specific attention masks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SongCreator by achieving state-of-the-art or competitive performances on all eight tasks. Notably, it surpasses previous works by a large margin in lyrics-to-song and lyrics-to-vocals. Additionally, it is able to independently control the acoustic conditions of the vocals and accompaniment in the generated song through different audio prompts, exhibiting its potential applicability. Our samples are available at https: //thuhcsi. github. io/SongCreator/.

PDF Details DOI

IJCAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

DiffuseStyleGesture: Stylized Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Diffusion Models

Sicheng Yang
Zhiyong Wu
Minglei Li
Zhensong Zhang
Lei Hao
Weihong Bao
Ming Cheng
Long Xiao

The art of communication beyond speech there are gestures. The automatic co-speech gesture generation draws much attention in computer animation. It is a challenging task due to the diversity of gestures and the difficulty of matching the rhythm and semantics of the gesture to the corresponding speech. To address these problems, we present DiffuseStyleGesture, a diffusion model based speech-driven gesture generation approach. It generates high-quality, speech-matched, stylized, and diverse co-speech gestures based on given speeches of arbitrary length. Specifically, we introduce cross-local attention and self-attention to the gesture diffusion pipeline to generate better speech matched and realistic gestures. We then train our model with classifier-free guidance to control the gesture style by interpolation or extrapolation. Additionally, we improve the diversity of generated gestures with different initial gestures and noise. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms recent approaches on speech-driven gesture generation. Our code, pre-trained models, and demos are available at https: //github. com/YoungSeng/DiffuseStyleGesture.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Unsupervised Explanation Generation via Correct Instantiations

Sijie Cheng
Zhiyong Wu
Jiangjie Chen
Zhixing Li
Yang Liu
Lingpeng Kong

While large pre-trained language models (PLM) have shown their great skills at solving discriminative tasks, a significant gap remains when compared with humans for explanation-related tasks. Among them, explaining the reason why a statement is wrong (e.g., against commonsense) is incredibly challenging. The major difficulty is finding the conflict point, where the statement contradicts our real world. This paper proposes Neon, a two-phrase, unsupervised explanation generation framework. Neon first generates corrected instantiations of the statement (phase I), then uses them to prompt large PLMs to find the conflict point and complete the explanation (phase II). We conduct extensive experiments on two standard explanation benchmarks, i.e., ComVE and e-SNLI. According to both automatic and human evaluations, Neon outperforms baselines, even for those with human-annotated instantiations. In addition to explaining a negative prediction, we further demonstrate that Neon remains effective when generalizing to different scenarios. The resources of Neon are available at: https://github.com/Shark-NLP/Neon.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

What Does Your Face Sound Like? 3D Face Shape towards Voice

Zhihan Yang
Zhiyong Wu
Ying Shan
Jia Jia

Face-based speech synthesis provides a practical solution to generate voices from human faces. However, directly using 2D face images leads to the problems of uninterpretability and entanglement. In this paper, to address the issues, we introduce 3D face shape which (1) has an anatomical relationship between voice characteristics, partaking in the "bone conduction" of human timbre production, and (2) is naturally independent of irrelevant factors by excluding the blending process. We devise a three-stage framework to generate speech from 3D face shapes. Fully considering timbre production in anatomical and acquired terms, our framework incorporates three additional relevant attributes including face texture, facial features, and demographics. Experiments and subjective tests demonstrate our method can generate utterances matching faces well, with good audio quality and voice diversity. We also explore and visualize how the voice changes with the face. Case studies show that our method upgrades the face-voice inference to personalized custom-made voice creating, revealing a promising prospect in virtual human and dubbing applications.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Inferring Emotion from Large-scale Internet Voice Data: A Semi-supervised Curriculum Augmentation based Deep Learning Approach

Suping Zhou
Jia Jia
Zhiyong Wu
Zhihan Yang
Yanfeng Wang
Wei Chen
Fanbo Meng
Shuo Huang

Effective emotion inference from user queries helps to give a more personified response for Voice Dialogue Applications(VDAs). The tremendous amounts of VDA users bring in diverse emotion expressions. How to achieve a high emotion inferring performance from large-scale Internet Voice Data in VDAs? Traditionally, researches on speech emotion recognition are based on acted voice datasets, which have limited speakers but strong and clear emotion expressions. Inspired by this, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to leverage acted voice data with strong emotion expressions to enhance large-scale unlabeled internet voice data with diverse emotion expressions for emotion inferring. Specifically, we propose a novel semi-supervised multi-modal curriculum augmentation deep learning framework. First, to learn more general emotion cues, we adopt a curriculum learning based epoch-wise training strategy, which trains our model guided by strong and balanced emotion samples from acted voice data and sub-sequently leverages weak and unbalanced emotion samples from internet voice data. Second, to employ more diverse emotion expressions, we design a Multi-path Mixmatch Multimodal Deep Neural Network(MMMD), which effectively learns feature representations for multiple modalities and trains labeled and unlabeled data in hybrid semisupervised methods for superior generalisation and robustness. Experiments on an internet voice dataset with 500, 000 utterances show our method outperforms (+10. 09% in terms of F1) several alternative baselines, while an acted corpus with 2, 397 utterances contributes 4. 35%. To further compare our method with state-of-the-art techniques in traditionally acted voice datasets, we also conduct experiments on public dataset IEMOCAP. The results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

PDF Details

IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Towards Discriminative Representation Learning for Speech Emotion Recognition

Runnan Li
Zhiyong Wu
Jia Jia
Yaohua Bu
Sheng Zhao
Helen Meng

In intelligent speech interaction, automatic speech emotion recognition (SER) plays an important role in understanding user intention. While sentimental speech has different speaker characteristics but similar acoustic attributes, one vital challenge in SER is how to learn robust and discriminative representations for emotion inferring. In this paper, inspired by human emotion perception, we propose a novel representation learning component (RLC) for SER system, which is constructed with Multi-head Self-attention and Global Context-aware Attention Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neutral Network (GCA-LSTM). With the ability of Multi-head Self-attention mechanism in modeling the element-wise correlative dependencies, RLC can exploit the common patterns of sentimental speech features to enhance emotion-salient information importing in representation learning. By employing GCA-LSTM, RLC can selectively focus on emotion-salient factors with the consideration of entire utterance context, and gradually produce discriminative representation for emotion inferring. Experiments on public emotional benchmark database IEMOCAP and a tremendous realistic interaction database demonstrate the outperformance of the proposed SER framework, with 6. 6% to 26. 7% relative improvement on unweighted accuracy compared to state-of-the-art techniques.

PDF Details

AAAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Multi-Task Deep Learning for User Intention Understanding in Speech Interaction Systems

Yishuang Ning
Jia Jia
Zhiyong Wu
Runnan Li
Yongsheng An
Yanfeng Wang
Helen Meng

Speech interaction systems have been gaining popularity in recent years. The main purpose of these systems is to generate more satisfactory responses according to users’ speech utterances, in which the most critical problem is to analyze user intention. Researches show that user intention conveyed through speech is not only expressed by content, but also closely related with users’ speaking manners (e. g. with or without acoustic emphasis). How to incorporate these heterogeneous attributes to infer user intention remains an open problem. In this paper, we deﬁne Intention Prominence (IP) as the semantic combination of focus by text and emphasis by speech, and propose a multi-task deep learning framework to predict IP. Speciﬁcally, we ﬁrst use long short-term memory (LSTM) which is capable of modeling long short-term contextual dependencies to detect focus and emphasis, and incorporate the tasks for focus and emphasis detection with multi-task learning (MTL) to reinforce the performance of each other. We then employ Bayesian network (BN) to incorporate multimodal features (focus, emphasis, and location reﬂecting users’ dialect conventions) to predict IP based on feature correlations. Experiments on a data set of 135, 566 utterances collected from real-world Sogou Voice Assistant illustrate that our method can outperform the comparison methods over 6. 9-24. 5% in terms of F1-measure. Moreover, a real practice in the Sogou Voice Assistant indicates that our method can improve the performance on user intention understanding by 7%.

PDF Details

IJCAI Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Modelling High-Dimensional Sequences with LSTM-RTRBM: Application to Polyphonic Music Generation

Qi Lyu
Zhiyong Wu
Jun Zhu
Helen Meng

We propose an automatic music generation demo based on artificial neural networks, which integrates the ability of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) in memorizing and retrieving useful history information, together with the advantage of Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) in high dimensional data modelling. Our model can generalize to different musical styles and generate polyphonic music better than previous models.

PDF Details