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Tianrui Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Tianrui Wang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Dimensions and dimension spectra of Non-autonomous iterated function systems

Non-autonomous iterated function systems are a generalization of iterated function systems. If the contractions in the system are conformal mappings, it is called a non-autonomous conformal iterated function system, and its attractor is called a non-autonomous conformal set. In this paper, we study intermediate dimension spectra of non-autonomous conformal sets which provide a unifying framework for Hausdorff and box-counting dimensions. First, we obtain the intermediate dimension spectra formula of non-autonomous conformal sets by using upper and lower topological pressures. As a consequence, we obtain simplified forms of their Hausdorff, packing and box dimensions. Finally, we explore the Hausdorff dimensions of the non-autonomous infinite conformal iterated function systems which consists of countably many conformal mappings at each level, and we provide the Hausdorff dimension formula under certain conditions.

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Generalized q-dimensions of measures on Non-autonomous conformal sets

We study the generalized q-dimensions of measures supported on non-autonomous conformal attractors, which are the generalizations of Moran sets and the attractors of iterated function systems. We first prove that the critical values of generalized upper and lower pressure functions are always the upper bounds for the upper and lower generalized q-dimensions of measures supported on non-autonomous conformal sets. Then we obtain dimension formulas for generalized q-dimensions if non-autonomous conformal attractors satisfy certain separation conditions, and moreover, the generalized q-dimension formulae may be simplified for the Bernoulli measures. Finally, we provide the generalized q-dimension formulae for measures supported on autonomous conformal sets.

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InstructAudio: Unified speech and music generation with natural language instruction

Text-to-speech (TTS) and text-to-music (TTM) models face significant limitations in instruction-based control. TTS systems usually depend on reference audio for timbre, offer only limited text-level attribute control, and rarely support dialogue generation. TTM systems are constrained by input conditioning requirements that depend on expert knowledge annotations. The high heterogeneity of these input control conditions makes them difficult to joint modeling with speech synthesis. Despite sharing common acoustic modeling characteristics, these two tasks have long been developed independently, leaving open the challenge of achieving unified modeling through natural language instructions. We introduce InstructAudio, a unified framework that enables instruction-based (natural language descriptions) control of acoustic attributes including timbre (gender, age), paralinguistic (emotion, style, accent), and musical (genre, instrument, rhythm, atmosphere). It supports expressive speech, music, and dialogue generation in English and Chinese. The model employs joint and single diffusion transformer layers with a standardized instruction-phoneme input format, trained on 50K hours of speech and 20K hours of music data, enabling multi-task learning and cross-modal alignment. Fig. 1 visualizes performance comparisons with mainstream TTS and TTM models, demonstrating that InstructAudio achieves optimal results on most metrics. To our best knowledge, InstructAudio represents the first instruction-controlled framework unifying speech and music generation. Audio samples are available at: https://qiangchunyu.github.io/InstructAudio/

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Perturbation Self-Supervised Representations for Cross-Lingual Emotion TTS: Stage-Wise Modeling of Emotion and Speaker

Cross-lingual emotional text-to-speech (TTS) aims to produce speech in one language that captures the emotion of a speaker from another language while maintaining the target voice's timbre. This process of cross-lingual emotional speech synthesis presents a complex challenge, necessitating flexible control over emotion, timbre, and language. However, emotion and timbre are highly entangled in speech signals, making fine-grained control challenging. To address this issue, we propose EMM-TTS, a novel two-stage cross-lingual emotional speech synthesis framework based on perturbed self-supervised learning (SSL) representations. In the first stage, the model explicitly and implicitly encodes prosodic cues to capture emotional expressiveness, while the second stage restores the timbre from perturbed SSL representations. We further investigate the effect of different speaker perturbation strategies-formant shifting and speaker anonymization-on the disentanglement of emotion and timbre. To strengthen speaker preservation and expressive control, we introduce Speaker Consistency Loss (SCL) and Speaker-Emotion Adaptive Layer Normalization (SEALN) modules. Additionally, we find that incorporating explicit acoustic features (e.g., F0, energy, and duration) alongside pretrained latent features improves voice cloning performance. Comprehensive multi-metric evaluations, including both subjective and objective measures, demonstrate that EMM-TTS achieves superior naturalness, emotion transferability, and timbre consistency across languages.

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Learning Time-Graph Frequency Representation for Monaural Speech Enhancement

The Graph Fourier Transform (GFT) has recently demonstrated promising results in speech enhancement. However, existing GFT-based speech enhancement approaches often employ fixed graph topologies to build the graph Fourier basis, whose the representation lacks the adaptively and flexibility. In addition, they suffer from the numerical errors and instability introduced by matrix inversion in GFT based on both Singular Value Decomposition (GFT-SVD) and Eigen Vector Decomposition (GFT-EVD). Motivated by these limitations, this paper propose a simple yet effective learnable GFT-SVD framework for speech enhancement. Specifically, we leverage graph shift operators to construct a learnable graph topology and define a learnable graph Fourier basis by the singular value matrices using 1-D convolution (Conv-1D) neural layer. This eliminates the need for matrix inversion, thereby avoiding the associated numerical errors and stability problem.

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LORT: Locally Refined Convolution and Taylor Transformer for Monaural Speech Enhancement

Achieving superior enhancement performance while maintaining a low parameter count and computational complexity remains a challenge in the field of speech enhancement. In this paper, we introduce LORT, a novel architecture that integrates spatial-channel enhanced Taylor Transformer and locally refined convolution for efficient and robust speech enhancement. We propose a Taylor multi-head self-attention (T-MSA) module enhanced with spatial-channel enhancement attention (SCEA), designed to facilitate inter-channel information exchange and alleviate the spatial attention limitations inherent in Taylor-based Transformers. To complement global modeling, we further present a locally refined convolution (LRC) block that integrates convolutional feed-forward layers, time-frequency dense local convolutions, and gated units to capture fine-grained local details. Built upon a U-Net-like encoder-decoder structure with only 16 output channels in the encoder, LORT processes noisy inputs through multi-resolution T-MSA modules using alternating downsampling and upsampling operations. The enhanced magnitude and phase spectra are decoded independently and optimized through a composite loss function that jointly considers magnitude, complex, phase, discriminator, and consistency objectives. Experimental results on the VCTK+DEMAND and DNS Challenge datasets demonstrate that LORT achieves competitive or superior performance to state-of-the-art (SOTA) models with only 0.96M parameters, highlighting its effectiveness for real-world speech enhancement applications with limited computational resources.

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Evaluating Bias in Spoken Dialogue LLMs for Real-World Decisions and Recommendations

While biases in large language models (LLMs), such as stereotypes and cultural tendencies in outputs, have been examined and identified, their presence and characteristics in spoken dialogue models (SDMs) with audio input and output remain largely unexplored. Paralinguistic features, such as age, gender, and accent, can affect model outputs; when compounded by multi-turn conversations, these effects may exacerbate biases, with potential implications for fairness in decision-making and recommendation tasks. In this paper, we systematically evaluate biases in speech LLMs and study the impact of multi-turn dialogues with repeated negative feedback. Bias is measured using Group Unfairness Score (GUS) for decisions and similarity-based normalized statistics rate (SNSR) for recommendations, across both open-source models like Qwen2.5-Omni and GLM-4-Voice, as well as closed-source APIs such as GPT-4o Audio and Gemini-2.5-Flash. Our analysis reveals that closed-source models generally exhibit lower bias, while open-source models are more sensitive to age and gender, and recommendation tasks tend to amplify cross-group disparities. We found that biased decisions may persist in multi-turn conversations. This work provides the first systematic study of biases in end-to-end spoken dialogue models, offering insights towards fair and reliable audio-based interactive systems. To facilitate further research, we release the FairDialogue dataset and evaluation code.

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Pay More Attention To Audio: Mitigating Imbalance of Cross-Modal Attention in Large Audio Language Models

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) often suffer from audio-textual attention imbalance, prioritizing text over acoustic information, particularly in the multi-modal fusion layers of the Transformer architecture. This bias hinders their ability to fully utilize acoustic cues, causing suboptimal performance on audio reasoning tasks. To mitigate this, we propose \textbf{MATA}, a novel training-free method that dynamically pushes LALMs to pay \textbf{M}ore \textbf{A}ttention \textbf{T}o \textbf{A}udio tokens within the self-attention mechanism. Specifically, MATA intervenes post raw attention scoring, targeting only the last token in intermediate layers without introducing additional parameters or computational overhead. Experiments on the MMAU and MMAR benchmarks confirm MATA's effectiveness, with consistent performance gains. Notably, on MMAR, MATA enables an open-source model to surpass the proprietary Gemini 2.0 Flash for the first time. Our work provides an efficient solution to mitigate attention bias and opens a new research direction for enhancing the audio-processing capabilities of multi-modal models.

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EmoVoice: LLM-based Emotional Text-To-Speech Model with Freestyle Text Prompting

Human speech goes beyond the mere transfer of information; it is a profound exchange of emotions and a connection between individuals. While Text-to-Speech (TTS) models have made huge progress, they still face challenges in controlling the emotional expression in the generated speech. In this work, we propose EmoVoice, a novel emotion-controllable TTS model that exploits large language models (LLMs) to enable fine-grained freestyle natural language emotion control, and a phoneme boost variant design that makes the model output phoneme tokens and audio tokens in parallel to enhance content consistency, inspired by chain-of-thought (CoT) and chain-of-modality (CoM) techniques. Besides, we introduce EmoVoice-DB, a high-quality 40-hour English emotion dataset featuring expressive speech and fine-grained emotion labels with natural language descriptions. EmoVoice achieves state-of-the-art performance on the English EmoVoice-DB test set using only synthetic training data, and on the Chinese Secap test set using our in-house data. We further investigate the reliability of existing emotion evaluation metrics and their alignment with human perceptual preferences, and explore using SOTA multimodal LLMs GPT-4o-audio and Gemini to assess emotional speech. Dataset, code, checkpoints, and demo samples are available at https://github.com/yanghaha0908/EmoVoice.

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SecoustiCodec: Cross-Modal Aligned Streaming Single-Codecbook Speech Codec

Speech codecs serve as a crucial bridge in unifying speech and text language models. Existing codec methods face several challenges in semantic encoding, such as residual paralinguistic information (e.g., timbre, emotion), insufficient semantic completeness, limited reconstruction capability, and lack of support for streaming. To address these challenges, we propose SecoustiCodec, a cross-modal aligned low-bitrate streaming speech codec that disentangles semantic and paralinguistic information in a single-codebook space. To ensure semantic completeness and reconstruction fidelity, paralinguistic encoding is introduced to bridge the information gap between semantic and acoustic encoding. A semantic-only efficient quantization method based on VAE (Variational Autoencoder) and FSQ (Finite Scalar Quantization) is proposed. This approach alleviates the long-tail distribution problem of tokens while maintaining high codebook utilization. A semantic disentanglement method based on contrastive learning is proposed, which aligns text and speech in a joint multimodal frame-level space, effectively removing paralinguistic information from semantic encoding. An acoustic-constrained multi-stage optimization strategy is proposed to ensure robust and stable convergence. Figure~\ref{fig:pesq_kbps_below_2kbps} shows SecoustiCodec achieves SOTA (state-of-the-art) reconstruction quality (PESQ) of 1.77/2.58 at 0.27/1 kbps. The code and model weights for SecoustiCodec will be open-sourced upon the completion of the peer-review process. We've open-sourced SecoustiCodec's demo, code, and model weights.

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ASDA: Audio Spectrogram Differential Attention Mechanism for Self-Supervised Representation Learning

In recent advancements in audio self-supervised representation learning, the standard Transformer architecture has emerged as the predominant approach, yet its attention mechanism often allocates a portion of attention weights to irrelevant information, potentially impairing the model's discriminative ability. To address this, we introduce a differential attention mechanism, which effectively mitigates ineffective attention allocation through the integration of dual-softmax operations and appropriately tuned differential coefficients. Experimental results demonstrate that our ASDA model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across multiple benchmarks, including audio classification (49.0% mAP on AS-2M, 41.5% mAP on AS20K), keyword spotting (98.3% accuracy on SPC-2), and environmental sound classification (96.1% accuracy on ESC-50). These results highlight ASDA's effectiveness in audio tasks, paving the way for broader applications.

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VQ-CTAP: Cross-Modal Fine-Grained Sequence Representation Learning for Speech Processing

Deep learning has brought significant improvements to the field of cross-modal representation learning. For tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS), voice conversion (VC), and automatic speech recognition (ASR), a cross-modal fine-grained (frame-level) sequence representation is desired, emphasizing the semantic content of the text modality while de-emphasizing the paralinguistic information of the speech modality. We propose a method called "Vector Quantized Contrastive Token-Acoustic Pre-training (VQ-CTAP)", which uses the cross-modal aligned sequence transcoder to bring text and speech into a joint multimodal space, learning how to connect text and speech at the frame level. The proposed VQ-CTAP is a paradigm for cross-modal sequence representation learning, offering a promising solution for fine-grained generation and recognition tasks in speech processing. The VQ-CTAP can be directly applied to VC and ASR tasks without fine-tuning or additional structures. We propose a sequence-aware semantic connector, which connects multiple frozen pre-trained modules for the TTS task, exhibiting a plug-and-play capability. We design a stepping optimization strategy to ensure effective model convergence by gradually injecting and adjusting the influence of various loss components. Furthermore, we propose a semantic-transfer-wise paralinguistic consistency loss to enhance representational capabilities, allowing the model to better generalize to unseen data and capture the nuances of paralinguistic information. In addition, VQ-CTAP achieves high-compression speech coding at a rate of 25Hz from 24kHz input waveforms, which is a 960-fold reduction in the sampling rate. The audio demo is available at https://qiangchunyu.github.io/VQCTAP/

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MMAR: A Challenging Benchmark for Deep Reasoning in Speech, Audio, Music, and Their Mix

We introduce MMAR, a new benchmark designed to evaluate the deep reasoning capabilities of Audio-Language Models (ALMs) across massive multi-disciplinary tasks. MMAR comprises 1,000 meticulously curated audio-question-answer triplets, collected from real-world internet videos and refined through iterative error corrections and quality checks to ensure high quality. Unlike existing benchmarks that are limited to specific domains of sound, music, or speech, MMAR extends them to a broad spectrum of real-world audio scenarios, including mixed-modality combinations of sound, music, and speech. Each question in MMAR is hierarchically categorized across four reasoning layers: Signal, Perception, Semantic, and Cultural, with additional sub-categories within each layer to reflect task diversity and complexity. To further foster research in this area, we annotate every question with a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationale to promote future advancements in audio reasoning. Each item in the benchmark demands multi-step deep reasoning beyond surface-level understanding. Moreover, a part of the questions requires graduate-level perceptual and domain-specific knowledge, elevating the benchmark's difficulty and depth. We evaluate MMAR using a broad set of models, including Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs), Large Audio Reasoning Models (LARMs), Omni Language Models (OLMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), with audio caption inputs. The performance of these models on MMAR highlights the benchmark's challenging nature, and our analysis further reveals critical limitations of understanding and reasoning capabilities among current models. We hope MMAR will serve as a catalyst for future advances in this important but little-explored area.

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Adapting Whisper for Code-Switching through Encoding Refining and Language-Aware Decoding

Code-switching (CS) automatic speech recognition (ASR) faces challenges due to the language confusion resulting from accents, auditory similarity, and seamless language switches. Adaptation on the pre-trained multi-lingual model has shown promising performance for CS-ASR. In this paper, we adapt Whisper, which is a large-scale multilingual pre-trained speech recognition model, to CS from both encoder and decoder parts. First, we propose an encoder refiner to enhance the encoder's capacity of intra-sentence swithching. Second, we propose using two sets of language-aware adapters with different language prompt embeddings to achieve language-specific decoding information in each decoder layer. Then, a fusion module is added to fuse the language-aware decoding. The experimental results using the SEAME dataset show that, compared with the baseline model, the proposed approach achieves a relative MER reduction of 4.1% and 7.2% on the dev_man and dev_sge test sets, respectively, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. Through experiments, we found that the proposed method significantly improves the performance on non-native language in CS speech, indicating that our approach enables Whisper to better distinguish between the two languages.

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Reducing the Gap Between Pretrained Speech Enhancement and Recognition Models Using a Real Speech-Trained Bridging Module

The information loss or distortion caused by single-channel speech enhancement (SE) harms the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR). Observation addition (OA) is an effective post-processing method to improve ASR performance by balancing noisy and enhanced speech. Determining the OA coefficient is crucial. However, the currently supervised OA coefficient module, called the bridging module, only utilizes simulated noisy speech for training, which has a severe mismatch with real noisy speech. In this paper, we propose training strategies to train the bridging module with real noisy speech. First, DNSMOS is selected to evaluate the perceptual quality of real noisy speech with no need for the corresponding clean label to train the bridging module. Additional constraints during training are introduced to enhance the robustness of the bridging module further. Each utterance is evaluated by the ASR back-end using various OA coefficients to obtain the word error rates (WERs). The WERs are used to construct a multidimensional vector. This vector is introduced into the bridging module with multi-task learning and is used to determine the optimal OA coefficients. The experimental results on the CHiME-4 dataset show that the proposed methods all had significant improvement compared with the simulated data trained bridging module, especially under real evaluation sets.

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Mamba-SEUNet: Mamba UNet for Monaural Speech Enhancement

In recent speech enhancement (SE) research, transformer and its variants have emerged as the predominant methodologies. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism imposes certain limitations on practical deployment. Mamba, as a novel state-space model (SSM), has gained widespread application in natural language processing and computer vision due to its strong capabilities in modeling long sequences and relatively low computational complexity. In this work, we introduce Mamba-SEUNet, an innovative architecture that integrates Mamba with U-Net for SE tasks. By leveraging bidirectional Mamba to model forward and backward dependencies of speech signals at different resolutions, and incorporating skip connections to capture multi-scale information, our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Experimental results on the VCTK+DEMAND dataset indicate that Mamba-SEUNet attains a PESQ score of 3.59, while maintaining low computational complexity. When combined with the Perceptual Contrast Stretching technique, Mamba-SEUNet further improves the PESQ score to 3.73.

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Time-Graph Frequency Representation with Singular Value Decomposition for Neural Speech Enhancement

Time-frequency (T-F) domain methods for monaural speech enhancement have benefited from the success of deep learning. Recently, focus has been put on designing two-stream network models to predict amplitude mask and phase separately, or, coupling the amplitude and phase into Cartesian coordinates and constructing real and imaginary pairs. However, most methods suffer from the alignment modeling of amplitude and phase (real and imaginary pairs) in a two-stream network framework, which inevitably incurs performance restrictions. In this paper, we introduce a graph Fourier transform defined with the singular value decomposition (GFT-SVD), resulting in real-valued time-graph representation for neural speech enhancement. This real-valued representation-based GFT-SVD provides an ability to align the modeling of amplitude and phase, leading to avoiding recovering the target speech phase information. Our findings demonstrate the effects of real-valued time-graph representation based on GFT-SVD for neutral speech enhancement. The extensive speech enhancement experiments establish that the combination of GFT-SVD and DNN outperforms the combination of GFT with the eigenvector decomposition (GFT-EVD) and magnitude estimation UNet, and outperforms the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) and DNN, regarding objective intelligibility and perceptual quality. We release our source code at: https://github.com/Wangfighting0015/GFT\_project.

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Intermediate dimensions of Moran sets and their visualization

Intermediate dimensions are a class of new fractal dimensions which provide a spectrum of dimensions interpolating between the Hausdorff and box-counting dimensions. In this paper, we study the intermediate dimensions of Moran sets. Moran sets may be regarded as a generalization of self-similar sets generated by using different class of similar mappings at each level with unfixed translations, and this causes the lack of ergodic properties on Moran set. Therefore, the intermediate dimensions do not necessarily exist, and we calculate the upper and lower intermediate dimensions of Moran sets. In particular, we obtain a simplified intermediate dimension formula for homogeneous Moran sets. Moreover, we study the visualization of the upper intermediate dimensions for some homogeneous Moran sets, and we show that their upper intermediate dimensions are given by Mobius transformations.

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