Get trending papers in your email inbox once a day!
Get trending papers in your email inbox!
SubscribeMDAR: A Multi-scene Dynamic Audio Reasoning Benchmark
The ability to reason from audio, including speech, paralinguistic cues, environmental sounds, and music, is essential for AI agents to interact effectively in real-world scenarios. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on static or single-scene settings and do not fully capture scenarios where multiple speakers, unfolding events, and heterogeneous audio sources interact. To address these challenges, we introduce MDAR, a benchmark for evaluating models on complex, multi-scene, and dynamically evolving audio reasoning tasks. MDAR comprises 3,000 carefully curated question-answer pairs linked to diverse audio clips, covering five categories of complex reasoning and spanning three question types. We benchmark 26 state-of-the-art audio language models on MDAR and observe that they exhibit limitations in complex reasoning tasks. On single-choice questions, Qwen2.5-Omni (open-source) achieves 76.67% accuracy, whereas GPT-4o Audio (closed-source) reaches 68.47%; however, GPT-4o Audio substantially outperforms Qwen2.5-Omni on the more challenging multiple-choice and open-ended tasks. Across all three question types, no model achieves 80% performance. These findings underscore the unique challenges posed by MDAR and its value as a benchmark for advancing audio reasoning research.Code and benchmark can be found at https://github.com/luckyerr/MDAR.
WavReward: Spoken Dialogue Models With Generalist Reward Evaluators
End-to-end spoken dialogue models such as GPT-4o-audio have recently garnered significant attention in the speech domain. However, the evaluation of spoken dialogue models' conversational performance has largely been overlooked. This is primarily due to the intelligent chatbots convey a wealth of non-textual information which cannot be easily measured using text-based language models like ChatGPT. To address this gap, we propose WavReward, a reward feedback model based on audio language models that can evaluate both the IQ and EQ of spoken dialogue systems with speech input. Specifically, 1) based on audio language models, WavReward incorporates the deep reasoning process and the nonlinear reward mechanism for post-training. By utilizing multi-sample feedback via the reinforcement learning algorithm, we construct a specialized evaluator tailored to spoken dialogue models. 2) We introduce ChatReward-30K, a preference dataset used to train WavReward. ChatReward-30K includes both comprehension and generation aspects of spoken dialogue models. These scenarios span various tasks, such as text-based chats, nine acoustic attributes of instruction chats, and implicit chats. WavReward outperforms previous state-of-the-art evaluation models across multiple spoken dialogue scenarios, achieving a substantial improvement about Qwen2.5-Omni in objective accuracy from 55.1% to 91.5%. In subjective A/B testing, WavReward also leads by a margin of 83%. Comprehensive ablation studies confirm the necessity of each component of WavReward. All data and code will be publicly at https://github.com/jishengpeng/WavReward after the paper is accepted.
mSTEB: Massively Multilingual Evaluation of LLMs on Speech and Text Tasks
Large Language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of tasks, including in multimodal settings such as speech. However, their evaluation is often limited to English and a few high-resource languages. For low-resource languages, there is no standardized evaluation benchmark. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing mSTEB, a new benchmark to evaluate the performance of LLMs on a wide range of tasks covering language identification, text classification, question answering, and translation tasks on both speech and text modalities. We evaluated the performance of leading LLMs such as Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT-4o (Audio) and state-of-the-art open models such as Qwen 2 Audio and Gemma 3 27B. Our evaluation shows a wide gap in performance between high-resource and low-resource languages, especially for languages spoken in Africa and Americas/Oceania. Our findings show that more investment is needed to address their under-representation in LLMs coverage.
VoiceAssistant-Eval: Benchmarking AI Assistants across Listening, Speaking, and Viewing
The growing capabilities of large language models and multimodal systems have spurred interest in voice-first AI assistants, yet existing benchmarks are inadequate for evaluating the full range of these systems' capabilities. We introduce VoiceAssistant-Eval, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess AI assistants across listening, speaking, and viewing. VoiceAssistant-Eval comprises 10,497 curated examples spanning 13 task categories. These tasks include natural sounds, music, and spoken dialogue for listening; multi-turn dialogue, role-play imitation, and various scenarios for speaking; and highly heterogeneous images for viewing. To demonstrate its utility, we evaluate 21 open-source models and GPT-4o-Audio, measuring the quality of the response content and speech, as well as their consistency. The results reveal three key findings: (1) proprietary models do not universally outperform open-source models; (2) most models excel at speaking tasks but lag in audio understanding; and (3) well-designed smaller models can rival much larger ones. Notably, the mid-sized Step-Audio-2-mini (7B) achieves more than double the listening accuracy of LLaMA-Omni2-32B-Bilingual. However, challenges remain: multimodal (audio plus visual) input and role-play voice imitation tasks are difficult for current models, and significant gaps persist in robustness and safety alignment. VoiceAssistant-Eval identifies these gaps and establishes a rigorous framework for evaluating and guiding the development of next-generation AI assistants. Code and data will be released at https://mathllm.github.io/VoiceAssistantEval/ .
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 modality-of-thought (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. Demo samples are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EmoVoice-DF55. Dataset, code, and checkpoints will be released.
Best-of-N Jailbreaking
We introduce Best-of-N (BoN) Jailbreaking, a simple black-box algorithm that jailbreaks frontier AI systems across modalities. BoN Jailbreaking works by repeatedly sampling variations of a prompt with a combination of augmentations - such as random shuffling or capitalization for textual prompts - until a harmful response is elicited. We find that BoN Jailbreaking achieves high attack success rates (ASRs) on closed-source language models, such as 89% on GPT-4o and 78% on Claude 3.5 Sonnet when sampling 10,000 augmented prompts. Further, it is similarly effective at circumventing state-of-the-art open-source defenses like circuit breakers. BoN also seamlessly extends to other modalities: it jailbreaks vision language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4o and audio language models (ALMs) like Gemini 1.5 Pro, using modality-specific augmentations. BoN reliably improves when we sample more augmented prompts. Across all modalities, ASR, as a function of the number of samples (N), empirically follows power-law-like behavior for many orders of magnitude. BoN Jailbreaking can also be composed with other black-box algorithms for even more effective attacks - combining BoN with an optimized prefix attack achieves up to a 35% increase in ASR. Overall, our work indicates that, despite their capability, language models are sensitive to seemingly innocuous changes to inputs, which attackers can exploit across modalities.
CCFQA: A Benchmark for Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Speech and Text Factuality Evaluation
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly popularized in the multilingual world, ensuring hallucination-free factuality becomes markedly crucial. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating the reliability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) predominantly focus on textual or visual modalities with a primary emphasis on English, which creates a gap in evaluation when processing multilingual input, especially in speech. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Cross-lingual and Cross-modal Factuality benchmark (CCFQA). Specifically, the CCFQA benchmark contains parallel speech-text factual questions across 8 languages, designed to systematically evaluate MLLMs' cross-lingual and cross-modal factuality capabilities. Our experimental results demonstrate that current MLLMs still face substantial challenges on the CCFQA benchmark. Furthermore, we propose a few-shot transfer learning strategy that effectively transfers the Question Answering (QA) capabilities of LLMs in English to multilingual Spoken Question Answering (SQA) tasks, achieving competitive performance with GPT-4o-mini-Audio using just 5-shot training. We release CCFQA as a foundational research resource to promote the development of MLLMs with more robust and reliable speech understanding capabilities. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/yxduir/ccfqa.
GPT-4o System Card
GPT-4o is an autoregressive omni model that accepts as input any combination of text, audio, image, and video, and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It's trained end-to-end across text, vision, and audio, meaning all inputs and outputs are processed by the same neural network. GPT-4o can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time in conversation. It matches GPT-4 Turbo performance on text in English and code, with significant improvement on text in non-English languages, while also being much faster and 50\% cheaper in the API. GPT-4o is especially better at vision and audio understanding compared to existing models. In line with our commitment to building AI safely and consistent with our voluntary commitments to the White House, we are sharing the GPT-4o System Card, which includes our Preparedness Framework evaluations. In this System Card, we provide a detailed look at GPT-4o's capabilities, limitations, and safety evaluations across multiple categories, focusing on speech-to-speech while also evaluating text and image capabilities, and measures we've implemented to ensure the model is safe and aligned. We also include third-party assessments on dangerous capabilities, as well as discussion of potential societal impacts of GPT-4o's text and vision capabilities.
Mini-Omni2: Towards Open-source GPT-4o with Vision, Speech and Duplex Capabilities
GPT-4o, an all-encompassing model, represents a milestone in the development of large multi-modal language models. It can understand visual, auditory, and textual modalities, directly output audio, and support flexible duplex interaction. Models from the open-source community often achieve some functionalities of GPT-4o, such as visual understanding and voice chat. Nevertheless, training a unified model that incorporates all modalities is challenging due to the complexities of multi-modal data, intricate model architectures, and training processes. In this paper, we introduce Mini-Omni2, a visual-audio assistant capable of providing real-time, end-to-end voice responses to visoin and audio queries. By integrating pretrained visual and auditory encoders, Mini-Omni2 maintains performance in individual modalities. We propose a three-stage training process to align modalities, allowing the language model to handle multi-modal inputs and outputs after training on a limited dataset. For interaction, we introduce a command-based interruption mechanism, enabling more flexible interaction with users. To the best of our knowledge, Mini-Omni2 is one of the closest reproductions of GPT-4o, which have similar form of functionality, and we hope it can offer valuable insights for subsequent research.
WildSpeech-Bench: Benchmarking Audio LLMs in Natural Speech Conversation
Recent multi-modal Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o have demonstrated strong capabilities of direct speech interaction. However, the lack of specialized and comprehensive benchmarks for end-to-end speech LLM evaluation hinders optimizing the user experience of Audio LLMs in real-world applications. Existing evaluation methods often adapt text-based benchmarks, overlooking speech's unique characteristics and challenges, including prosody, homophones, stuttering, and differing user expectations. Here, we present a novel approach to thoroughly evaluate LLMs in practical speech conversations. We systematically curate real-world chat data relevant to spoken scenarios, introduce diversity in speaker attributes and acoustic conditions, and augment the dataset with speech-specific phenomena. We further design a query-aware evaluation method to use customized evaluation checklists and prompts to enhance the accuracy of automatic evaluation. We conduct comprehensive testing and detailed analysis of various mainstream speech models, revealing significant differences in model performance across different speech scenarios. The use of query-aware evaluation further enables a finer-grained assessment under various speech-specific scenarios. Our benchmark can provide valuable insights for speech model development and evaluation.
Benchmarking Open-ended Audio Dialogue Understanding for Large Audio-Language Models
Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have unclocked audio dialogue capabilities, where audio dialogues are a direct exchange of spoken language between LALMs and humans. Recent advances, such as GPT-4o, have enabled LALMs in back-and-forth audio dialogues with humans. This progression not only underscores the potential of LALMs but also broadens their applicability across a wide range of practical scenarios supported by audio dialogues. However, given these advancements, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate the performance of LALMs in the open-ended audio dialogue understanding remains absent currently. To address this gap, we propose an Audio Dialogue Understanding Benchmark (ADU-Bench), which consists of 4 benchmark datasets. They assess the open-ended audio dialogue ability for LALMs in 3 general scenarios, 12 skills, 9 multilingual languages, and 4 categories of ambiguity handling. Notably, we firstly propose the evaluation of ambiguity handling in audio dialogues that expresses different intentions beyond the same literal meaning of sentences, e.g., "Really!?" with different intonations. In summary, ADU-Bench includes over 20,000 open-ended audio dialogues for the assessment of LALMs. Through extensive experiments conducted on 13 LALMs, our analysis reveals that there is still considerable room for improvement in the audio dialogue understanding abilities of existing LALMs. In particular, they struggle with mathematical symbols and formulas, understanding human behavior such as roleplay, comprehending multiple languages, and handling audio dialogue ambiguities from different phonetic elements, such as intonations, pause positions, and homophones.
AV-Odyssey Bench: Can Your Multimodal LLMs Really Understand Audio-Visual Information?
Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Reka Core, have expanded their capabilities to include vision and audio modalities. While these models demonstrate impressive performance across a wide range of audio-visual applications, our proposed DeafTest reveals that MLLMs often struggle with simple tasks humans find trivial: 1) determining which of two sounds is louder, and 2) determining which of two sounds has a higher pitch. Motivated by these observations, we introduce AV-Odyssey Bench, a comprehensive audio-visual benchmark designed to assess whether those MLLMs can truly understand the audio-visual information. This benchmark encompasses 4,555 carefully crafted problems, each incorporating text, visual, and audio components. To successfully infer answers, models must effectively leverage clues from both visual and audio inputs. To ensure precise and objective evaluation of MLLM responses, we have structured the questions as multiple-choice, eliminating the need for human evaluation or LLM-assisted assessment. We benchmark a series of closed-source and open-source models and summarize the observations. By revealing the limitations of current models, we aim to provide useful insight for future dataset collection and model development.
video-SALMONN 2: Captioning-Enhanced Audio-Visual Large Language Models
Videos contain a wealth of information, and generating detailed and accurate descriptions in natural language is a key aspect of video understanding. In this paper, we present video-SALMONN 2, an advanced audio-visual large language model (LLM) with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) designed for enhanced video (with paired audio) captioning through directed preference optimisation (DPO). We propose new metrics to evaluate the completeness and accuracy of video descriptions, which are optimised using DPO. To further improve training, we propose a novel multi-round DPO (MrDPO) approach, which involves periodically updating the DPO reference model, merging and re-initialising the LoRA module as a proxy for parameter updates after each training round (1,000 steps), and incorporating guidance from ground-truth video captions to stabilise the process. Experimental results show that MrDPO significantly enhances video-SALMONN 2's captioning accuracy, reducing the captioning error rates by 28\%. The final video-SALMONN 2 model, with just 7 billion parameters, surpasses leading models such as GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5-Pro in video captioning tasks, while maintaining highly competitive performance to the state-of-the-art on widely used video question-answering benchmarks among models of similar size. Codes are available at https://github.com/bytedance/video-SALMONN-2{https://github.com/bytedance/video-SALMONN-2}.
BLAB: Brutally Long Audio Bench
Developing large audio language models (LMs) capable of understanding diverse spoken interactions is essential for accommodating the multimodal nature of human communication and can increase the accessibility of language technologies across different user populations. Recent work on audio LMs has primarily evaluated their performance on short audio segments, typically under 30 seconds, with limited exploration of long-form conversational speech segments that more closely reflect natural user interactions with these models. We introduce Brutally Long Audio Bench (BLAB), a challenging long-form audio benchmark that evaluates audio LMs on localization, duration estimation, emotion, and counting tasks using audio segments averaging 51 minutes in length. BLAB consists of 833+ hours of diverse, full-length audio clips, each paired with human-annotated, text-based natural language questions and answers. Our audio data were collected from permissively licensed sources and underwent a human-assisted filtering process to ensure task compliance. We evaluate six open-source and proprietary audio LMs on BLAB and find that all of them, including advanced models such as Gemini 2.0 Pro and GPT-4o, struggle with the tasks in BLAB. Our comprehensive analysis reveals key insights into the trade-offs between task difficulty and audio duration. In general, we find that audio LMs struggle with long-form speech, with performance declining as duration increases. They perform poorly on localization, temporal reasoning, counting, and struggle to understand non-phonemic information, relying more on prompts than audio content. BLAB serves as a challenging evaluation framework to develop audio LMs with robust long-form audio understanding capabilities.
StoryTeller: Improving Long Video Description through Global Audio-Visual Character Identification
Existing large vision-language models (LVLMs) are largely limited to processing short, seconds-long videos and struggle with generating coherent descriptions for extended video spanning minutes or more. Long video description introduces new challenges, such as plot-level consistency across descriptions. To address these, we figure out audio-visual character identification, matching character names to each dialogue, as a key factor. We propose StoryTeller, a system for generating dense descriptions of long videos, incorporating both low-level visual concepts and high-level plot information. StoryTeller uses a multimodal large language model that integrates visual, audio, and text modalities to perform audio-visual character identification on minute-long video clips. The results are then fed into a LVLM to enhance consistency of video description. We validate our approach on movie description tasks and introduce MovieStory101, a dataset with dense descriptions for three-minute movie clips. To evaluate long video descriptions, we create MovieQA, a large set of multiple-choice questions for the MovieStory101 test set. We assess descriptions by inputting them into GPT-4 to answer these questions, using accuracy as an automatic evaluation metric. Experiments show that StoryTeller outperforms all open and closed-source baselines on MovieQA, achieving 9.5% higher accuracy than the strongest baseline, Gemini-1.5-pro, and demonstrating a +15.56% advantage in human side-by-side evaluations. Additionally, incorporating audio-visual character identification from StoryTeller improves the performance of all video description models, with Gemini-1.5-pro and GPT-4o showing relative improvement of 5.5% and 13.0%, respectively, in accuracy on MovieQA.
Qwen3-Omni Technical Report
We present Qwen3-Omni, a single multimodal model that, for the first time, maintains state-of-the-art performance across text, image, audio, and video without any degradation relative to single-modal counterparts. Qwen3-Omni matches the performance of same-sized single-modal models within the Qwen series and excels particularly on audio tasks. Across 36 audio and audio-visual benchmarks, Qwen3-Omni achieves open-source SOTA on 32 benchmarks and overall SOTA on 22, outperforming strong closed-source models such as Gemini-2.5-Pro, Seed-ASR, and GPT-4o-Transcribe. Qwen3-Omni adopts a Thinker-Talker MoE architecture that unifies perception and generation across text, images, audio, and video, yielding fluent text and natural real-time speech. It supports text interaction in 119 languages, speech understanding in 19 languages, and speech generation in 10 languages. To reduce first-packet latency in streaming synthesis, Talker autoregressively predicts discrete speech codecs using a multi-codebook scheme. Leveraging the representational capacity of these codebooks, we replace computationally intensive block-wise diffusion with a lightweight causal ConvNet, enabling streaming from the first codec frame. In cold-start settings, Qwen3-Omni achieves a theoretical end-to-end first-packet latency of 234 ms. To further strengthen multimodal reasoning, we introduce a Thinking model that explicitly reasons over inputs from any modality. Since the research community currently lacks a general-purpose audio captioning model, we fine-tuned Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B to obtain Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Captioner, which produces detailed, low-hallucination captions for arbitrary audio inputs. Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B, Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Thinking, and Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Captioner are publicly released under the Apache 2.0 license.
S2S-Arena, Evaluating Speech2Speech Protocols on Instruction Following with Paralinguistic Information
The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has brought significant attention to speech models, particularly recent progress in speech2speech protocols supporting speech input and output. However, the existing benchmarks adopt automatic text-based evaluators for evaluating the instruction following ability of these models lack consideration for paralinguistic information in both speech understanding and generation. To address these issues, we introduce S2S-Arena, a novel arena-style S2S benchmark that evaluates instruction-following capabilities with paralinguistic information in both speech-in and speech-out across real-world tasks. We design 154 samples that fused TTS and live recordings in four domains with 21 tasks and manually evaluate existing popular speech models in an arena-style manner. The experimental results show that: (1) in addition to the superior performance of GPT-4o, the speech model of cascaded ASR, LLM, and TTS outperforms the jointly trained model after text-speech alignment in speech2speech protocols; (2) considering paralinguistic information, the knowledgeability of the speech model mainly depends on the LLM backbone, and the multilingual support of that is limited by the speech module; (3) excellent speech models can already understand the paralinguistic information in speech input, but generating appropriate audio with paralinguistic information is still a challenge.
Advancing Speech Language Models by Scaling Supervised Fine-Tuning with Over 60,000 Hours of Synthetic Speech Dialogue Data
The GPT-4o represents a significant milestone in enabling real-time interaction with large language models (LLMs) through speech, its remarkable low latency and high fluency not only capture attention but also stimulate research interest in the field. This real-time speech interaction is particularly valuable in scenarios requiring rapid feedback and immediate responses, dramatically enhancing user experience. However, there is a notable lack of research focused on real-time large speech language models, particularly for Chinese. In this work, we present KE-Omni, a seamless large speech language model built upon Ke-SpeechChat, a large-scale high-quality synthetic speech interaction dataset consisting of 7 million Chinese and English conversations, featuring 42,002 speakers, and totaling over 60,000 hours, This contributes significantly to the advancement of research and development in this field. The demos can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/spaces/KE-Team/KE-Omni.
Echo-4o: Harnessing the Power of GPT-4o Synthetic Images for Improved Image Generation
Recently, GPT-4o has garnered significant attention for its strong performance in image generation, yet open-source models still lag behind. Several studies have explored distilling image data from GPT-4o to enhance open-source models, achieving notable progress. However, a key question remains: given that real-world image datasets already constitute a natural source of high-quality data, why should we use GPT-4o-generated synthetic data? In this work, we identify two key advantages of synthetic images. First, they can complement rare scenarios in real-world datasets, such as surreal fantasy or multi-reference image generation, which frequently occur in user queries. Second, they provide clean and controllable supervision. Real-world data often contains complex background noise and inherent misalignment between text descriptions and image content, whereas synthetic images offer pure backgrounds and long-tailed supervision signals, facilitating more accurate text-to-image alignment. Building on these insights, we introduce Echo-4o-Image, a 180K-scale synthetic dataset generated by GPT-4o, harnessing the power of synthetic image data to address blind spots in real-world coverage. Using this dataset, we fine-tune the unified multimodal generation baseline Bagel to obtain Echo-4o. In addition, we propose two new evaluation benchmarks for a more accurate and challenging assessment of image generation capabilities: GenEval++, which increases instruction complexity to mitigate score saturation, and Imagine-Bench, which focuses on evaluating both the understanding and generation of imaginative content. Echo-4o demonstrates strong performance across standard benchmarks. Moreover, applying Echo-4o-Image to other foundation models (e.g., OmniGen2, BLIP3-o) yields consistent performance gains across multiple metrics, highlighting the datasets strong transferability.
Swiss Parliaments Corpus Re-Imagined (SPC_R): Enhanced Transcription with RAG-based Correction and Predicted BLEU
This paper presents a new long-form release of the Swiss Parliaments Corpus, converting entire multi-hour Swiss German debate sessions (each aligned with the official session protocols) into high-quality speech-text pairs. Our pipeline starts by transcribing all session audio into Standard German using Whisper Large-v3 under high-compute settings. We then apply a two-step GPT-4o correction process: first, GPT-4o ingests the raw Whisper output alongside the official protocols to refine misrecognitions, mainly named entities. Second, a separate GPT-4o pass evaluates each refined segment for semantic completeness. We filter out any segments whose Predicted BLEU score (derived from Whisper's average token log-probability) and GPT-4o evaluation score fall below a certain threshold. The final corpus contains 801 hours of audio, of which 751 hours pass our quality control. Compared to the original sentence-level SPC release, our long-form dataset achieves a 6-point BLEU improvement, demonstrating the power of combining robust ASR, LLM-based correction, and data-driven filtering for low-resource, domain-specific speech corpora.
Mini-Omni: Language Models Can Hear, Talk While Thinking in Streaming
Recent advances in language models have achieved significant progress. GPT-4o, as a new milestone, has enabled real-time conversations with humans, demonstrating near-human natural fluency. Such human-computer interaction necessitates models with the capability to perform reasoning directly with the audio modality and generate output in streaming. However, this remains beyond the reach of current academic models, as they typically depend on extra TTS systems for speech synthesis, resulting in undesirable latency. This paper introduces the Mini-Omni, an audio-based end-to-end conversational model, capable of real-time speech interaction. To achieve this capability, we propose a text-instructed speech generation method, along with batch-parallel strategies during inference to further boost the performance. Our method also helps to retain the original model's language capabilities with minimal degradation, enabling other works to establish real-time interaction capabilities. We call this training method "Any Model Can Talk". We also introduce the VoiceAssistant-400K dataset to fine-tune models optimized for speech output. To our best knowledge, Mini-Omni is the first fully end-to-end, open-source model for real-time speech interaction, offering valuable potential for future research.
Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4o(mni) Native Image Generation
Recently, the visual generation ability by GPT-4o(mni) has been unlocked by OpenAI. It demonstrates a very remarkable generation capability with excellent multimodal condition understanding and varied task instructions. In this paper, we aim to explore the capabilities of GPT-4o across various tasks. Inspired by previous study, we constructed a task taxonomy along with a carefully curated set of test samples to conduct a comprehensive qualitative test. Benefiting from GPT-4o's powerful multimodal comprehension, its image-generation process demonstrates abilities surpassing those of traditional image-generation tasks. Thus, regarding the dimensions of model capabilities, we evaluate its performance across six task categories: traditional image generation tasks, discriminative tasks, knowledge-based generation, commonsense-based generation, spatially-aware image generation, and temporally-aware image generation. These tasks not only assess the quality and conditional alignment of the model's outputs but also probe deeper into GPT-4o's understanding of real-world concepts. Our results reveal that GPT-4o performs impressively well in general-purpose synthesis tasks, showing strong capabilities in text-to-image generation, visual stylization, and low-level image processing. However, significant limitations remain in its ability to perform precise spatial reasoning, instruction-grounded generation, and consistent temporal prediction. Furthermore, when faced with knowledge-intensive or domain-specific scenarios, such as scientific illustrations or mathematical plots, the model often exhibits hallucinations, factual errors, or structural inconsistencies. These findings suggest that while GPT-4o marks a substantial advancement in unified multimodal generation, there is still a long way to go before it can be reliably applied to professional or safety-critical domains.
GPT-ImgEval: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Diagnosing GPT4o in Image Generation
The recent breakthroughs in OpenAI's GPT4o model have demonstrated surprisingly good capabilities in image generation and editing, resulting in significant excitement in the community. This technical report presents the first-look evaluation benchmark (named GPT-ImgEval), quantitatively and qualitatively diagnosing GPT-4o's performance across three critical dimensions: (1) generation quality, (2) editing proficiency, and (3) world knowledge-informed semantic synthesis. Across all three tasks, GPT-4o demonstrates strong performance, significantly surpassing existing methods in both image generation control and output quality, while also showcasing exceptional knowledge reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, based on the GPT-4o's generated data, we propose a classification-model-based approach to investigate the underlying architecture of GPT-4o, where our empirical results suggest the model consists of an auto-regressive (AR) combined with a diffusion-based head for image decoding, rather than the VAR-like architectures. We also provide a complete speculation on GPT-4o's overall architecture. In addition, we conduct a series of analyses to identify and visualize GPT-4o's specific limitations and the synthetic artifacts commonly observed in its image generation. We also present a comparative study of multi-round image editing between GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash, and discuss the safety implications of GPT-4o's outputs, particularly their detectability by existing image forensic models. We hope that our work can offer valuable insight and provide a reliable benchmark to guide future research, foster reproducibility, and accelerate innovation in the field of image generation and beyond. The codes and datasets used for evaluating GPT-4o can be found at https://github.com/PicoTrex/GPT-ImgEval.
A Preliminary Study for GPT-4o on Image Restoration
OpenAI's GPT-4o model, integrating multi-modal inputs and outputs within an autoregressive architecture, has demonstrated unprecedented performance in image generation. In this work, we investigate its potential impact on the image restoration community. We present the first systematic evaluation of GPT-4o across diverse restoration tasks. Our experiments reveal that, although restoration outputs from GPT-4o are visually appealing, they often suffer from pixel-level structural fidelity when compared to ground-truth images. Common issues are variations in image proportions, shifts in object positions and quantities, and changes in viewpoint.To address it, taking image dehazing, derainning, and low-light enhancement as representative case studies, we show that GPT-4o's outputs can serve as powerful visual priors, substantially enhancing the performance of existing dehazing networks. It offers practical guidelines and a baseline framework to facilitate the integration of GPT-4o into future image restoration pipelines. We hope the study on GPT-4o image restoration will accelerate innovation in the broader field of image generation areas. To support further research, we will release GPT-4o-restored images from over 10 widely used image restoration datasets.
ELECTRA and GPT-4o: Cost-Effective Partners for Sentiment Analysis
Bidirectional transformers excel at sentiment analysis, and Large Language Models (LLM) are effective zero-shot learners. Might they perform better as a team? This paper explores collaborative approaches between ELECTRA and GPT-4o for three-way sentiment classification. We fine-tuned (FT) four models (ELECTRA Base/Large, GPT-4o/4o-mini) using a mix of reviews from Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST) and DynaSent. We provided input from ELECTRA to GPT as: predicted label, probabilities, and retrieved examples. Sharing ELECTRA Base FT predictions with GPT-4o-mini significantly improved performance over either model alone (82.74 macro F1 vs. 79.29 ELECTRA Base FT, 79.52 GPT-4o-mini) and yielded the lowest cost/performance ratio (\0.12/F1 point). However, when GPT models were fine-tuned, including predictions decreased performance. GPT-4o FT-M was the top performer (86.99), with GPT-4o-mini FT close behind (86.77) at much less cost (0.38 vs. \$1.59/F1 point). Our results show that augmenting prompts with predictions from fine-tuned encoders is an efficient way to boost performance, and a fine-tuned GPT-4o-mini is nearly as good as GPT-4o FT at 76% less cost. Both are affordable options for projects with limited resources.
STEVE: AStep Verification Pipeline for Computer-use Agent Training
Developing AI agents to autonomously manipulate graphical user interfaces is a long challenging task. Recent advances in data scaling law inspire us to train computer-use agents with a scaled instruction set, yet using behavior cloning to train agents still requires immense high-quality trajectories. To meet the scalability need, we designed STEVE, a step verification pipeline for computer-use agent training. First, we establish a large instruction set for computer-use agents and collect trajectory data with some suboptimal agents. GPT-4o is used to verify the correctness of each step in the trajectories based on the screens before and after the action execution, assigning each step with a binary label. Last, we adopt the Kahneman and Tversky Optimization to optimize the agent from the binary stepwise labels. Extensive experiments manifest that our agent outperforms supervised finetuning by leveraging both positive and negative actions within a trajectory. Also, STEVE enables us to train a 7B vision-language model as a computer-use agent, achieving leading performance in the challenging live desktop environment WinAgentArena with great efficiency at a reduced cost. Code and data: https://github.com/FanbinLu/STEVE.
EMOVA: Empowering Language Models to See, Hear and Speak with Vivid Emotions
GPT-4o, an omni-modal model that enables vocal conversations with diverse emotions and tones, marks a milestone for omni-modal foundation models. However, empowering Large Language Models to perceive and generate images, texts, and speeches end-to-end with publicly available data remains challenging in the open-source community. Existing vision-language models rely on external tools for the speech processing, while speech-language models still suffer from limited or even without vision-understanding abilities. To address this gap, we propose EMOVA (EMotionally Omni-present Voice Assistant), to enable Large Language Models with end-to-end speech capabilities while maintaining the leading vision-language performance. With a semantic-acoustic disentangled speech tokenizer, we notice surprisingly that omni-modal alignment can further enhance vision-language and speech abilities compared with the corresponding bi-modal aligned counterparts. Moreover, a lightweight style module is proposed for flexible speech style controls (e.g., emotions and pitches). For the first time, EMOVA achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the vision-language and speech benchmarks, and meanwhile, supporting omni-modal spoken dialogue with vivid emotions.
GPT-4 Technical Report
We report the development of GPT-4, a large-scale, multimodal model which can accept image and text inputs and produce text outputs. While less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, GPT-4 exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks, including passing a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers. GPT-4 is a Transformer-based model pre-trained to predict the next token in a document. The post-training alignment process results in improved performance on measures of factuality and adherence to desired behavior. A core component of this project was developing infrastructure and optimization methods that behave predictably across a wide range of scales. This allowed us to accurately predict some aspects of GPT-4's performance based on models trained with no more than 1/1,000th the compute of GPT-4.
Continuous Speech Tokens Makes LLMs Robust Multi-Modality Learners
Recent advances in GPT-4o like multi-modality models have demonstrated remarkable progress for direct speech-to-speech conversation, with real-time speech interaction experience and strong speech understanding ability. However, current research focuses on discrete speech tokens to align with discrete text tokens for language modelling, which depends on an audio codec with residual connections or independent group tokens, such a codec usually leverages large scale and diverse datasets training to ensure that the discrete speech codes have good representation for varied domain, noise, style data reconstruction as well as a well-designed codec quantizer and encoder-decoder architecture for discrete token language modelling. This paper introduces Flow-Omni, a continuous speech token based GPT-4o like model, capable of real-time speech interaction and low streaming latency. Specifically, first, instead of cross-entropy loss only, we combine flow matching loss with a pretrained autoregressive LLM and a small MLP network to predict the probability distribution of the continuous-valued speech tokens from speech prompt. second, we incorporated the continuous speech tokens to Flow-Omni multi-modality training, thereby achieving robust speech-to-speech performance with discrete text tokens and continuous speech tokens together. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to discrete text and speech multi-modality training and its variants, the continuous speech tokens mitigate robustness issues by avoiding the inherent flaws of discrete speech code's representation loss for LLM.
AIR-Bench: Benchmarking Large Audio-Language Models via Generative Comprehension
Recently, instruction-following audio-language models have received broad attention for human-audio interaction. However, the absence of benchmarks capable of evaluating audio-centric interaction capabilities has impeded advancements in this field. Previous models primarily focus on assessing different fundamental tasks, such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), and lack an assessment of the open-ended generative capabilities centered around audio. Thus, it is challenging to track the progression in the Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) domain and to provide guidance for future improvement. In this paper, we introduce AIR-Bench (Audio InstRuction Benchmark), the first benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of LALMs to understand various types of audio signals (including human speech, natural sounds, and music), and furthermore, to interact with humans in the textual format. AIR-Bench encompasses two dimensions: foundation and chat benchmarks. The former consists of 19 tasks with approximately 19k single-choice questions, intending to inspect the basic single-task ability of LALMs. The latter one contains 2k instances of open-ended question-and-answer data, directly assessing the comprehension of the model on complex audio and its capacity to follow instructions. Both benchmarks require the model to generate hypotheses directly. We design a unified framework that leverages advanced language models, such as GPT-4, to evaluate the scores of generated hypotheses given the meta-information of the audio. Experimental results demonstrate a high level of consistency between GPT-4-based evaluation and human evaluation. By revealing the limitations of existing LALMs through evaluation results, AIR-Bench can provide insights into the direction of future research.
An Empirical Study of GPT-4o Image Generation Capabilities
The landscape of image generation has rapidly evolved, from early GAN-based approaches to diffusion models and, most recently, to unified generative architectures that seek to bridge understanding and generation tasks. Recent advances, especially the GPT-4o, have demonstrated the feasibility of high-fidelity multimodal generation, their architectural design remains mysterious and unpublished. This prompts the question of whether image and text generation have already been successfully integrated into a unified framework for those methods. In this work, we conduct an empirical study of GPT-4o's image generation capabilities, benchmarking it against leading open-source and commercial models. Our evaluation covers four main categories, including text-to-image, image-to-image, image-to-3D, and image-to-X generation, with more than 20 tasks. Our analysis highlights the strengths and limitations of GPT-4o under various settings, and situates it within the broader evolution of generative modeling. Through this investigation, we identify promising directions for future unified generative models, emphasizing the role of architectural design and data scaling.
WavChat: A Survey of Spoken Dialogue Models
Recent advancements in spoken dialogue models, exemplified by systems like GPT-4o, have captured significant attention in the speech domain. Compared to traditional three-tier cascaded spoken dialogue models that comprise speech recognition (ASR), large language models (LLMs), and text-to-speech (TTS), modern spoken dialogue models exhibit greater intelligence. These advanced spoken dialogue models not only comprehend audio, music, and other speech-related features, but also capture stylistic and timbral characteristics in speech. Moreover, they generate high-quality, multi-turn speech responses with low latency, enabling real-time interaction through simultaneous listening and speaking capability. Despite the progress in spoken dialogue systems, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys that systematically organize and analyze these systems and the underlying technologies. To address this, we have first compiled existing spoken dialogue systems in the chronological order and categorized them into the cascaded and end-to-end paradigms. We then provide an in-depth overview of the core technologies in spoken dialogue models, covering aspects such as speech representation, training paradigm, streaming, duplex, and interaction capabilities. Each section discusses the limitations of these technologies and outlines considerations for future research. Additionally, we present a thorough review of relevant datasets, evaluation metrics, and benchmarks from the perspectives of training and evaluating spoken dialogue systems. We hope this survey will contribute to advancing both academic research and industrial applications in the field of spoken dialogue systems. The related material is available at https://github.com/jishengpeng/WavChat.
Have we unified image generation and understanding yet? An empirical study of GPT-4o's image generation ability
OpenAI's multimodal GPT-4o has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in image generation and editing, yet its ability to achieve world knowledge-informed semantic synthesis--seamlessly integrating domain knowledge, contextual reasoning, and instruction adherence--remains unproven. In this study, we systematically evaluate these capabilities across three critical dimensions: (1) Global Instruction Adherence, (2) Fine-Grained Editing Precision, and (3) Post-Generation Reasoning. While existing benchmarks highlight GPT-4o's strong capabilities in image generation and editing, our evaluation reveals GPT-4o's persistent limitations: the model frequently defaults to literal interpretations of instructions, inconsistently applies knowledge constraints, and struggles with conditional reasoning tasks. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about GPT-4o's unified understanding and generation capabilities, exposing significant gaps in its dynamic knowledge integration. Our study calls for the development of more robust benchmarks and training strategies that go beyond surface-level alignment, emphasizing context-aware and reasoning-grounded multimodal generation.
MIO: A Foundation Model on Multimodal Tokens
In this paper, we introduce MIO, a novel foundation model built on multimodal tokens, capable of understanding and generating speech, text, images, and videos in an end-to-end, autoregressive manner. While the emergence of large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MM-LLMs) propels advancements in artificial general intelligence through their versatile capabilities, they still lack true any-to-any understanding and generation. Recently, the release of GPT-4o has showcased the remarkable potential of any-to-any LLMs for complex real-world tasks, enabling omnidirectional input and output across images, speech, and text. However, it is closed-source and does not support the generation of multimodal interleaved sequences. To address this gap, we present MIO, which is trained on a mixture of discrete tokens across four modalities using causal multimodal modeling. MIO undergoes a four-stage training process: (1) alignment pre-training, (2) interleaved pre-training, (3) speech-enhanced pre-training, and (4) comprehensive supervised fine-tuning on diverse textual, visual, and speech tasks. Our experimental results indicate that MIO exhibits competitive, and in some cases superior, performance compared to previous dual-modal baselines, any-to-any model baselines, and even modality-specific baselines. Moreover, MIO demonstrates advanced capabilities inherent to its any-to-any feature, such as interleaved video-text generation, chain-of-visual-thought reasoning, visual guideline generation, instructional image editing, etc.
M2M-Gen: A Multimodal Framework for Automated Background Music Generation in Japanese Manga Using Large Language Models
This paper introduces M2M Gen, a multi modal framework for generating background music tailored to Japanese manga. The key challenges in this task are the lack of an available dataset or a baseline. To address these challenges, we propose an automated music generation pipeline that produces background music for an input manga book. Initially, we use the dialogues in a manga to detect scene boundaries and perform emotion classification using the characters faces within a scene. Then, we use GPT4o to translate this low level scene information into a high level music directive. Conditioned on the scene information and the music directive, another instance of GPT 4o generates page level music captions to guide a text to music model. This produces music that is aligned with the mangas evolving narrative. The effectiveness of M2M Gen is confirmed through extensive subjective evaluations, showcasing its capability to generate higher quality, more relevant and consistent music that complements specific scenes when compared to our baselines.
An Early Evaluation of GPT-4V(ision)
In this paper, we evaluate different abilities of GPT-4V including visual understanding, language understanding, visual puzzle solving, and understanding of other modalities such as depth, thermal, video, and audio. To estimate GPT-4V's performance, we manually construct 656 test instances and carefully evaluate the results of GPT-4V. The highlights of our findings are as follows: (1) GPT-4V exhibits impressive performance on English visual-centric benchmarks but fails to recognize simple Chinese texts in the images; (2) GPT-4V shows inconsistent refusal behavior when answering questions related to sensitive traits such as gender, race, and age; (3) GPT-4V obtains worse results than GPT-4 (API) on language understanding tasks including general language understanding benchmarks and visual commonsense knowledge evaluation benchmarks; (4) Few-shot prompting can improve GPT-4V's performance on both visual understanding and language understanding; (5) GPT-4V struggles to find the nuances between two similar images and solve the easy math picture puzzles; (6) GPT-4V shows non-trivial performance on the tasks of similar modalities to image, such as video and thermal. Our experimental results reveal the ability and limitations of GPT-4V and we hope our paper can provide some insights into the application and research of GPT-4V.
Exploring Boundary of GPT-4V on Marine Analysis: A Preliminary Case Study
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated a powerful ability to answer various queries as a general-purpose assistant. The continuous multi-modal large language models (MLLM) empower LLMs with the ability to perceive visual signals. The launch of GPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) has generated significant interest in the research communities. GPT-4V(ison) has demonstrated significant power in both academia and industry fields, as a focal point in a new artificial intelligence generation. Though significant success was achieved by GPT-4V, exploring MLLMs in domain-specific analysis (e.g., marine analysis) that required domain-specific knowledge and expertise has gained less attention. In this study, we carry out the preliminary and comprehensive case study of utilizing GPT-4V for marine analysis. This report conducts a systematic evaluation of existing GPT-4V, assessing the performance of GPT-4V on marine research and also setting a new standard for future developments in MLLMs. The experimental results of GPT-4V show that the responses generated by GPT-4V are still far away from satisfying the domain-specific requirements of the marine professions. All images and prompts used in this study will be available at https://github.com/hkust-vgd/Marine_GPT-4V_Eval
Do You Hear What I Mean? Quantifying the Instruction-Perception Gap in Instruction-Guided Expressive Text-To-Speech Systems
Instruction-guided text-to-speech (ITTS) enables users to control speech generation through natural language prompts, offering a more intuitive interface than traditional TTS. However, the alignment between user style instructions and listener perception remains largely unexplored. This work first presents a perceptual analysis of ITTS controllability across two expressive dimensions (adverbs of degree and graded emotion intensity) and collects human ratings on speaker age and word-level emphasis attributes. To comprehensively reveal the instruction-perception gap, we provide a data collection with large-scale human evaluations, named Expressive VOice Control (E-VOC) corpus. Furthermore, we reveal that (1) gpt-4o-mini-tts is the most reliable ITTS model with great alignment between instruction and generated utterances across acoustic dimensions. (2) The 5 analyzed ITTS systems tend to generate Adult voices even when the instructions ask to use child or Elderly voices. (3) Fine-grained control remains a major challenge, indicating that most ITTS systems have substantial room for improvement in interpreting slightly different attribute instructions.
AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretraining
Although audio generation shares commonalities across different types of audio, such as speech, music, and sound effects, designing models for each type requires careful consideration of specific objectives and biases that can significantly differ from those of other types. To bring us closer to a unified perspective of audio generation, this paper proposes a framework that utilizes the same learning method for speech, music, and sound effect generation. Our framework introduces a general representation of audio, called language of audio (LOA). Any audio can be translated into LOA based on AudioMAE, a self-supervised pre-trained representation learning model. In the generation process, we translate any modalities into LOA by using a GPT-2 model, and we perform self-supervised audio generation learning with a latent diffusion model conditioned on LOA. The proposed framework naturally brings advantages such as in-context learning abilities and reusable self-supervised pretrained AudioMAE and latent diffusion models. Experiments on the major benchmarks of text-to-audio, text-to-music, and text-to-speech demonstrate new state-of-the-art or competitive performance to previous approaches. Our demo and code are available at https://audioldm.github.io/audioldm2.
Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale
Large-scale generative models such as GPT and DALL-E have revolutionized the research community. These models not only generate high fidelity outputs, but are also generalists which can solve tasks not explicitly taught. In contrast, speech generative models are still primitive in terms of scale and task generalization. In this paper, we present Voicebox, the most versatile text-guided generative model for speech at scale. Voicebox is a non-autoregressive flow-matching model trained to infill speech, given audio context and text, trained on over 50K hours of speech that are not filtered or enhanced. Similar to GPT, Voicebox can perform many different tasks through in-context learning, but is more flexible as it can also condition on future context. Voicebox can be used for mono or cross-lingual zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis, noise removal, content editing, style conversion, and diverse sample generation. In particular, Voicebox outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS model VALL-E on both intelligibility (5.9% vs 1.9% word error rates) and audio similarity (0.580 vs 0.681) while being up to 20 times faster. Audio samples can be found in https://voicebox.metademolab.com.
VoiceBench: Benchmarking LLM-Based Voice Assistants
Building on the success of large language models (LLMs), recent advancements such as GPT-4o have enabled real-time speech interactions through LLM-based voice assistants, offering a significantly improved user experience compared to traditional text-based interactions. However, the absence of benchmarks designed to evaluate these speech interaction capabilities has hindered progress of LLM-based voice assistants development. Current evaluations focus primarily on automatic speech recognition (ASR) or general knowledge evaluation with clean speeches, neglecting the more intricate, real-world scenarios that involve diverse speaker characteristics, environmental and content factors. To address this, we introduce VoiceBench, the first benchmark designed to provide a multi-faceted evaluation of LLM-based voice assistants. VoiceBench also includes both real and synthetic spoken instructions that incorporate the above three key real-world variations. Extensive experiments reveal the limitations of current LLM-based voice assistant models and offer valuable insights for future research and development in this field.
Model-Guided Dual-Role Alignment for High-Fidelity Open-Domain Video-to-Audio Generation
We present MGAudio, a novel flow-based framework for open-domain video-to-audio generation, which introduces model-guided dual-role alignment as a central design principle. Unlike prior approaches that rely on classifier-based or classifier-free guidance, MGAudio enables the generative model to guide itself through a dedicated training objective designed for video-conditioned audio generation. The framework integrates three main components: (1) a scalable flow-based Transformer model, (2) a dual-role alignment mechanism where the audio-visual encoder serves both as a conditioning module and as a feature aligner to improve generation quality, and (3) a model-guided objective that enhances cross-modal coherence and audio realism. MGAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance on VGGSound, reducing FAD to 0.40, substantially surpassing the best classifier-free guidance baselines, and consistently outperforms existing methods across FD, IS, and alignment metrics. It also generalizes well to the challenging UnAV-100 benchmark. These results highlight model-guided dual-role alignment as a powerful and scalable paradigm for conditional video-to-audio generation. Code is available at: https://github.com/pantheon5100/mgaudio
ShareGPT-4o-Image: Aligning Multimodal Models with GPT-4o-Level Image Generation
Recent advances in multimodal generative models have unlocked photorealistic, instruction-aligned image generation, yet leading systems like GPT-4o-Image remain proprietary and inaccessible. To democratize these capabilities, we present ShareGPT-4o-Image, the first dataset comprising 45K text-to-image and 46K text-and-image-to-image data, all synthesized using GPT-4o's image generation capabilities for distilling its advanced image generation abilities. Leveraging this dataset, we develop Janus-4o, a multimodal large language model capable of both text-to-image and text-and-image-to-image generation. Janus-4o not only significantly improves text-to-image generation over its predecessor, Janus-Pro, but also newly supports text-and-image-to-image generation. Notably, it achieves impressive performance in text-and-image-to-image generation from scratch, using only 91K synthetic samples and 6 hours of training on an 8 A800-GPU machine. We hope the release of ShareGPT-4o-Image and Janus-4o will foster open research in photorealistic, instruction-aligned image generation.
Both Ears Wide Open: Towards Language-Driven Spatial Audio Generation
Recently, diffusion models have achieved great success in mono-channel audio generation. However, when it comes to stereo audio generation, the soundscapes often have a complex scene of multiple objects and directions. Controlling stereo audio with spatial contexts remains challenging due to high data costs and unstable generative models. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to address these issues. We first construct a large-scale, simulation-based, and GPT-assisted dataset, BEWO-1M, with abundant soundscapes and descriptions even including moving and multiple sources. Beyond text modality, we have also acquired a set of images and rationally paired stereo audios through retrieval to advance multimodal generation. Existing audio generation models tend to generate rather random and indistinct spatial audio. To provide accurate guidance for Latent Diffusion Models, we introduce the SpatialSonic model utilizing spatial-aware encoders and azimuth state matrices to reveal reasonable spatial guidance. By leveraging spatial guidance, our model not only achieves the objective of generating immersive and controllable spatial audio from text but also extends to other modalities as the pioneer attempt. Finally, under fair settings, we conduct subjective and objective evaluations on simulated and real-world data to compare our approach with prevailing methods. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, highlighting its capability to generate spatial audio that adheres to physical rules.
Roadmap towards Superhuman Speech Understanding using Large Language Models
The success of large language models (LLMs) has prompted efforts to integrate speech and audio data, aiming to create general foundation models capable of processing both textual and non-textual inputs. Recent advances, such as GPT-4o, highlight the potential for end-to-end speech LLMs, which preserves non-semantic information and world knowledge for deeper speech understanding. To guide the development of speech LLMs, we propose a five-level roadmap, ranging from basic automatic speech recognition (ASR) to advanced superhuman models capable of integrating non-semantic information with abstract acoustic knowledge for complex tasks. Moreover, we design a benchmark, SAGI Bechmark, that standardizes critical aspects across various tasks in these five levels, uncovering challenges in using abstract acoustic knowledge and completeness of capability. Our findings reveal gaps in handling paralinguistic cues and abstract acoustic knowledge, and we offer future directions. This paper outlines a roadmap for advancing speech LLMs, introduces a benchmark for evaluation, and provides key insights into their current limitations and potential.
AudioGPT: Understanding and Generating Speech, Music, Sound, and Talking Head
Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. Despite the recent success, current LLMs are not capable of processing complex audio information or conducting spoken conversations (like Siri or Alexa). In this work, we propose a multi-modal AI system named AudioGPT, which complements LLMs (i.e., ChatGPT) with 1) foundation models to process complex audio information and solve numerous understanding and generation tasks; and 2) the input/output interface (ASR, TTS) to support spoken dialogue. With an increasing demand to evaluate multi-modal LLMs of human intention understanding and cooperation with foundation models, we outline the principles and processes and test AudioGPT in terms of consistency, capability, and robustness. Experimental results demonstrate the capabilities of AudioGPT in solving AI tasks with speech, music, sound, and talking head understanding and generation in multi-round dialogues, which empower humans to create rich and diverse audio content with unprecedented ease. Our system is publicly available at https://github.com/AIGC-Audio/AudioGPT.
BLSP-Emo: Towards Empathetic Large Speech-Language Models
The recent release of GPT-4o showcased the potential of end-to-end multimodal models, not just in terms of low latency but also in their ability to understand and generate expressive speech with rich emotions. While the details are unknown to the open research community, it likely involves significant amounts of curated data and compute, neither of which is readily accessible. In this paper, we present BLSP-Emo (Bootstrapped Language-Speech Pretraining with Emotion support), a novel approach to developing an end-to-end speech-language model capable of understanding both semantics and emotions in speech and generate empathetic responses. BLSP-Emo utilizes existing speech recognition (ASR) and speech emotion recognition (SER) datasets through a two-stage process. The first stage focuses on semantic alignment, following recent work on pretraining speech-language models using ASR data. The second stage performs emotion alignment with the pretrained speech-language model on an emotion-aware continuation task constructed from SER data. Our experiments demonstrate that the BLSP-Emo model excels in comprehending speech and delivering empathetic responses, both in instruction-following tasks and conversations.
VITA: Towards Open-Source Interactive Omni Multimodal LLM
The remarkable multimodal capabilities and interactive experience of GPT-4o underscore their necessity in practical applications, yet open-source models rarely excel in both areas. In this paper, we introduce VITA, the first-ever open-source Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) adept at simultaneous processing and analysis of Video, Image, Text, and Audio modalities, and meanwhile has an advanced multimodal interactive experience. Starting from Mixtral 8x7B as a language foundation, we expand its Chinese vocabulary followed by bilingual instruction tuning. We further endow the language model with visual and audio capabilities through two-stage multi-task learning of multimodal alignment and instruction tuning. VITA demonstrates robust foundational capabilities of multilingual, vision, and audio understanding, as evidenced by its strong performance across a range of both unimodal and multimodal benchmarks. Beyond foundational capabilities, we have made considerable progress in enhancing the natural multimodal human-computer interaction experience. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to exploit non-awakening interaction and audio interrupt in MLLM. VITA is the first step for the open-source community to explore the seamless integration of multimodal understanding and interaction. While there is still lots of work to be done on VITA to get close to close-source counterparts, we hope that its role as a pioneer can serve as a cornerstone for subsequent research. Project Page: https://vita-home.github.io.
OpenGPT-4o-Image: A Comprehensive Dataset for Advanced Image Generation and Editing
The performance of unified multimodal models for image generation and editing is fundamentally constrained by the quality and comprehensiveness of their training data. While existing datasets have covered basic tasks like style transfer and simple object manipulation, they often lack the systematic structure and challenging scenarios required for real-world applications. To address this bottleneck, we introduce OpenGPT-4o-Image, a large-scale dataset constructed using a novel methodology that combines hierarchical task taxonomy with automated data generation. Our taxonomy not only includes fundamental capabilities such as text rendering and style control but also introduces highly practical yet challenging categories like scientific imagery for chemistry illustrations and complex instruction editing requiring simultaneous execution of multiple operations. Through an automated pipeline leveraging structured resource pools and GPT-4o, we generate 80k high-quality instruction-image pairs with controlled diversity, covering 11 major domains and 51 subtasks. Extensive experiments show that fine-tuning leading models on our dataset achieves significant performance gains across multiple benchmarks, with improvements of up to 18\% on editing tasks (UniWorld-V1 on ImgEdit-Bench) and 13% on generation tasks (Harmon on GenEval). Our work demonstrates that systematic data construction is key to advancing multimodal AI capabilities.
GPT4Video: A Unified Multimodal Large Language Model for lnstruction-Followed Understanding and Safety-Aware Generation
While the recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) constitute a significant leap forward in the field, these models are predominantly confined to the realm of input-side multimodal comprehension, lacking the capacity for multimodal content generation. To fill this gap, we present GPT4Video, a unified multi-model framework that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the capability of both video understanding and generation. Specifically, we develop an instruction-following-based approach integrated with the stable diffusion generative model, which has demonstrated to effectively and securely handle video generation scenarios. GPT4Video offers the following benefits: 1) It exhibits impressive capabilities in both video understanding and generation scenarios. For example, GPT4Video outperforms Valley by 11.8\% on the Video Question Answering task, and surpasses NExt-GPT by 2.3\% on the Text to Video generation task. 2) it endows the LLM/MLLM with video generation capabilities without requiring additional training parameters and can flexibly interface with a wide range of models to perform video generation. 3) it maintains a safe and healthy conversation not only in output-side but also the input side in an end-to-end manner. Qualitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that GPT4Video holds the potential to function as a effective, safe and Humanoid-like video assistant that can handle both video understanding and generation scenarios.
Exploiting Foundation Models and Speech Enhancement for Parkinson's Disease Detection from Speech in Real-World Operative Conditions
This work is concerned with devising a robust Parkinson's (PD) disease detector from speech in real-world operating conditions using (i) foundational models, and (ii) speech enhancement (SE) methods. To this end, we first fine-tune several foundational-based models on the standard PC-GITA (s-PC-GITA) clean data. Our results demonstrate superior performance to previously proposed models. Second, we assess the generalization capability of the PD models on the extended PC-GITA (e-PC-GITA) recordings, collected in real-world operative conditions, and observe a severe drop in performance moving from ideal to real-world conditions. Third, we align training and testing conditions applaying off-the-shelf SE techniques on e-PC-GITA, and a significant boost in performance is observed only for the foundational-based models. Finally, combining the two best foundational-based models trained on s-PC-GITA, namely WavLM Base and Hubert Base, yielded top performance on the enhanced e-PC-GITA.
Generative Pre-trained Speech Language Model with Efficient Hierarchical Transformer
While recent advancements in speech language models have achieved significant progress, they face remarkable challenges in modeling the long acoustic sequences of neural audio codecs. In this paper, we introduce Generative Pre-trained Speech Transformer (GPST), a hierarchical transformer designed for efficient speech language modeling. GPST quantizes audio waveforms into two distinct types of discrete speech representations and integrates them within a hierarchical transformer architecture, allowing for a unified one-stage generation process and enhancing Hi-Res audio generation capabilities. By training on large corpora of speeches in an end-to-end unsupervised manner, GPST can generate syntactically consistent speech with diverse speaker identities. Given a brief 3-second prompt, GPST can produce natural and coherent personalized speech, demonstrating in-context learning abilities. Moreover, our approach can be easily extended to spoken cross-lingual speech generation by incorporating multi-lingual semantic tokens and universal acoustic tokens. Experimental results indicate that GPST significantly outperforms the existing speech language models in terms of word error rate, speech quality, and speaker similarity. See https://youngsheen.github.io/GPST/demo for demo samples.
The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)
Large multimodal models (LMMs) extend large language models (LLMs) with multi-sensory skills, such as visual understanding, to achieve stronger generic intelligence. In this paper, we analyze the latest model, GPT-4V(ision), to deepen the understanding of LMMs. The analysis focuses on the intriguing tasks that GPT-4V can perform, containing test samples to probe the quality and genericity of GPT-4V's capabilities, its supported inputs and working modes, and the effective ways to prompt the model. In our approach to exploring GPT-4V, we curate and organize a collection of carefully designed qualitative samples spanning a variety of domains and tasks. Observations from these samples demonstrate that GPT-4V's unprecedented ability in processing arbitrarily interleaved multimodal inputs and the genericity of its capabilities together make GPT-4V a powerful multimodal generalist system. Furthermore, GPT-4V's unique capability of understanding visual markers drawn on input images can give rise to new human-computer interaction methods such as visual referring prompting. We conclude the report with in-depth discussions on the emerging application scenarios and the future research directions for GPT-4V-based systems. We hope that this preliminary exploration will inspire future research on the next-generation multimodal task formulation, new ways to exploit and enhance LMMs to solve real-world problems, and gaining better understanding of multimodal foundation models.
Nexus-O: An Omni-Perceptive And -Interactive Model for Language, Audio, And Vision
Human beings perceive the real world through a spectrum of sensory modalities, encompassing auditory, visual, and linguistic faculties. The journey towards achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) necessitates the development of models that can emulate these multifaceted perceptual capabilities and comprehensively understand these diversified data. To this end, we introduce Nexus-O, an industry-level omni-perceptive and -interactive model capable of efficiently processing Audio, Image, Video, and Text data in any combination and output audio/text in an end-to-end way. We systematically investigate Nexus-O by addressing three key research questions: First, how can models be efficiently designed and trained to achieve tri-modal alignment, understanding and reasoning capabilities across multiple modalities? Second, what approaches can be implemented to evaluate tri-modal model robustness, ensuring reliable performance and applicability in real-world scenarios? Third, what strategies can be employed to curate and obtain high-quality, real-life scenario speech datasets? For the first question, we design and pre-train Nexus-O based on the vision-language model, rather than the language model. By pre-training the model over high-quality synthetic audio data, our model is capable of tri-modal perception and interaction. For the second question, we introduce a new audio testbed, Nexus-O-audio, comprising diverse Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) samples, spanning various real-world scenarios, such as corporate meetings and live stream. For the third question, we design the speech data synthesis pipeline to obtain high-quality speech training datasets, covering various real-world scenarios. Comprehensive experimentation and an in-depth analysis of tri-modal alignment over latent space demonstrate the advantages of our model on downstream tasks.
How Well Does GPT-4V(ision) Adapt to Distribution Shifts? A Preliminary Investigation
In machine learning, generalization against distribution shifts -- where deployment conditions diverge from the training scenarios -- is crucial, particularly in fields like climate modeling, biomedicine, and autonomous driving. The emergence of foundation models, distinguished by their extensive pretraining and task versatility, has led to an increased interest in their adaptability to distribution shifts. GPT-4V(ision) acts as the most advanced publicly accessible multimodal foundation model, with extensive applications across various domains, including anomaly detection, video understanding, image generation, and medical diagnosis. However, its robustness against data distributions remains largely underexplored. Addressing this gap, this study rigorously evaluates GPT-4V's adaptability and generalization capabilities in dynamic environments, benchmarking against prominent models like CLIP and LLaVA. We delve into GPT-4V's zero-shot generalization across 13 diverse datasets spanning natural, medical, and molecular domains. We further investigate its adaptability to controlled data perturbations and examine the efficacy of in-context learning as a tool to enhance its adaptation. Our findings delineate GPT-4V's capability boundaries in distribution shifts, shedding light on its strengths and limitations across various scenarios. Importantly, this investigation contributes to our understanding of how AI foundation models generalize to distribution shifts, offering pivotal insights into their adaptability and robustness. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/jameszhou-gl/gpt-4v-distribution-shift.
X-LLM: Bootstrapping Advanced Large Language Models by Treating Multi-Modalities as Foreign Languages
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable language abilities. GPT-4, based on advanced LLMs, exhibits extraordinary multimodal capabilities beyond previous visual language models. We attribute this to the use of more advanced LLMs compared with previous multimodal models. Unfortunately, the model architecture and training strategies of GPT-4 are unknown. To endow LLMs with multimodal capabilities, we propose X-LLM, which converts Multi-modalities (images, speech, videos) into foreign languages using X2L interfaces and inputs them into a large Language model (ChatGLM). Specifically, X-LLM aligns multiple frozen single-modal encoders and a frozen LLM using X2L interfaces, where ``X'' denotes multi-modalities such as image, speech, and videos, and ``L'' denotes languages. X-LLM's training consists of three stages: (1) Converting Multimodal Information: The first stage trains each X2L interface to align with its respective single-modal encoder separately to convert multimodal information into languages. (2) Aligning X2L representations with the LLM: single-modal encoders are aligned with the LLM through X2L interfaces independently. (3) Integrating multiple modalities: all single-modal encoders are aligned with the LLM through X2L interfaces to integrate multimodal capabilities into the LLM. Our experiments show that X-LLM demonstrates impressive multimodel chat abilities, sometimes exhibiting the behaviors of multimodal GPT-4 on unseen images/instructions, and yields a 84.5\% relative score compared with GPT-4 on a synthetic multimodal instruction-following dataset. And we also conduct quantitative tests on using LLM for ASR and multimodal ASR, hoping to promote the era of LLM-based speech recognition.
LLaMA-Omni: Seamless Speech Interaction with Large Language Models
Models like GPT-4o enable real-time interaction with large language models (LLMs) through speech, significantly enhancing user experience compared to traditional text-based interaction. However, there is still a lack of exploration on how to build speech interaction models based on open-source LLMs. To address this, we propose LLaMA-Omni, a novel model architecture designed for low-latency and high-quality speech interaction with LLMs. LLaMA-Omni integrates a pretrained speech encoder, a speech adaptor, an LLM, and a streaming speech decoder. It eliminates the need for speech transcription, and can simultaneously generate text and speech responses directly from speech instructions with extremely low latency. We build our model based on the latest Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct model. To align the model with speech interaction scenarios, we construct a dataset named InstructS2S-200K, which includes 200K speech instructions and corresponding speech responses. Experimental results show that compared to previous speech-language models, LLaMA-Omni provides better responses in both content and style, with a response latency as low as 226ms. Additionally, training LLaMA-Omni takes less than 3 days on just 4 GPUs, paving the way for the efficient development of speech-language models in the future.
Parallel GPT: Harmonizing the Independence and Interdependence of Acoustic and Semantic Information for Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech
Advances in speech representation and large language models have enhanced zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) performance. However, existing zero-shot TTS models face challenges in capturing the complex correlations between acoustic and semantic features, resulting in a lack of expressiveness and similarity. The primary reason lies in the complex relationship between semantic and acoustic features, which manifests independent and interdependent aspects.This paper introduces a TTS framework that combines both autoregressive (AR) and non-autoregressive (NAR) modules to harmonize the independence and interdependence of acoustic and semantic information. The AR model leverages the proposed Parallel Tokenizer to synthesize the top semantic and acoustic tokens simultaneously. In contrast, considering the interdependence, the Coupled NAR model predicts detailed tokens based on the general AR model's output. Parallel GPT, built on this architecture, is designed to improve zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis through its parallel structure. Experiments on English and Chinese datasets demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms the quality and efficiency of the synthesis of existing zero-shot TTS models. Speech demos are available at https://t1235-ch.github.io/pgpt/.
Stable Audio Open
Open generative models are vitally important for the community, allowing for fine-tunes and serving as baselines when presenting new models. However, most current text-to-audio models are private and not accessible for artists and researchers to build upon. Here we describe the architecture and training process of a new open-weights text-to-audio model trained with Creative Commons data. Our evaluation shows that the model's performance is competitive with the state-of-the-art across various metrics. Notably, the reported FDopenl3 results (measuring the realism of the generations) showcase its potential for high-quality stereo sound synthesis at 44.1kHz.
Whisper-GPT: A Hybrid Representation Audio Large Language Model
We propose WHISPER-GPT: A generative large language model (LLM) for speech and music that allows us to work with continuous audio representations and discrete tokens simultaneously as part of a single architecture. There has been a huge surge in generative audio, speech, and music models that utilize discrete audio tokens derived from neural compression algorithms, e.g. ENCODEC. However, one of the major drawbacks of this approach is handling the context length. It blows up for high-fidelity generative architecture if one has to account for all the audio contents at various frequencies for the next token prediction. By combining continuous audio representation like the spectrogram and discrete acoustic tokens, we retain the best of both worlds: Have all the information needed from the audio at a specific time instance in a single token, yet allow LLM to predict the future token to allow for sampling and other benefits discrete space provides. We show how our architecture improves the perplexity and negative log-likelihood scores for the next token prediction compared to a token-based LLM for speech and music.
MeanAudio: Fast and Faithful Text-to-Audio Generation with Mean Flows
Recent developments in diffusion- and flow- based models have significantly advanced Text-to-Audio Generation (TTA). While achieving great synthesis quality and controllability, current TTA systems still suffer from slow inference speed, which significantly limits their practical applicability. This paper presents MeanAudio, a novel MeanFlow-based model tailored for fast and faithful text-to-audio generation. Built on a Flux-style latent transformer, MeanAudio regresses the average velocity field during training, enabling fast generation by mapping directly from the start to the endpoint of the flow trajectory. By incorporating classifier-free guidance (CFG) into the training target, MeanAudio incurs no additional cost in the guided sampling process. To further stabilize training, we propose an instantaneous-to-mean curriculum with flow field mix-up, which encourages the model to first learn the foundational instantaneous dynamics, and then gradually adapt to mean flows. This strategy proves critical for enhancing training efficiency and generation quality. Experimental results demonstrate that MeanAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-step audio generation. Specifically, it achieves a real time factor (RTF) of 0.013 on a single NVIDIA RTX 3090, yielding a 100x speedup over SOTA diffusion-based TTA systems. Moreover, MeanAudio also demonstrates strong performance in multi-step generation, enabling smooth and coherent transitions across successive synthesis steps.
Towards Event-oriented Long Video Understanding
With the rapid development of video Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), numerous benchmarks have been proposed to assess their video understanding capability. However, due to the lack of rich events in the videos, these datasets may suffer from the short-cut bias that the answers can be deduced from a few frames, without the need to watch the entire video. To address this issue, we introduce Event-Bench, an event-oriented long video understanding benchmark built on existing datasets and human annotations. Event-Bench includes six event-related tasks and 2,190 test instances to comprehensively evaluate video event understanding ability. Additionally, we propose Video Instruction Merging~(VIM), a cost-effective method that enhances video MLLMs using merged, event-intensive video instructions, addressing the scarcity of human-annotated, event-intensive data. Extensive experiments show that the best-performing model, GPT-4o, achieves an overall accuracy of 53.33, significantly outperforming the best open-source model by 41.42%. Leveraging an effective instruction synthesis method and an adaptive model architecture, VIM surpasses both state-of-the-art open-source models and GPT-4V on the Event-Bench. All code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Event-Bench.
Examining User-Friendly and Open-Sourced Large GPT Models: A Survey on Language, Multimodal, and Scientific GPT Models
Generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) with remarkable performance in various tasks and also extend their power to multimodal domains. Despite their success, large GPT models like GPT-4 face inherent limitations such as considerable size, high computational requirements, complex deployment processes, and closed development loops. These constraints restrict their widespread adoption and raise concerns regarding their responsible development and usage. The need for user-friendly, relatively small, and open-sourced alternative GPT models arises from the desire to overcome these limitations while retaining high performance. In this survey paper, we provide an examination of alternative open-sourced models of large GPTs, focusing on user-friendly and relatively small models that facilitate easier deployment and accessibility. Through this extensive survey, we aim to equip researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts with a thorough understanding of user-friendly and relatively small open-sourced models of large GPTs, their current state, challenges, and future research directions, inspiring the development of more efficient, accessible, and versatile GPT models that cater to the broader scientific community and advance the field of general artificial intelligence. The source contents are continuously updating in https://github.com/GPT-Alternatives/gpt_alternatives.
MultiModal-GPT: A Vision and Language Model for Dialogue with Humans
We present a vision and language model named MultiModal-GPT to conduct multi-round dialogue with humans. MultiModal-GPT can follow various instructions from humans, such as generating a detailed caption, counting the number of interested objects, and answering general questions from users. MultiModal-GPT is parameter-efficiently fine-tuned from OpenFlamingo, with Low-rank Adapter (LoRA) added both in the cross-attention part and the self-attention part of the language model. We first construct instruction templates with vision and language data for multi-modality instruction tuning to make the model understand and follow human instructions. We find the quality of training data is vital for the dialogue performance, where few data containing short answers can lead the model to respond shortly to any instructions. To further enhance the ability to chat with humans of the MultiModal-GPT, we utilize language-only instruction-following data to train the MultiModal-GPT jointly. The joint training of language-only and visual-language instructions with the same instruction template effectively improves dialogue performance. Various demos show the ability of continuous dialogue of MultiModal-GPT with humans. Code and demo are at https://github.com/open-mmlab/Multimodal-GPT
Sparks of Large Audio Models: A Survey and Outlook
This survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of the recent advancements and challenges in applying large language models to the field of audio signal processing. Audio processing, with its diverse signal representations and a wide range of sources--from human voices to musical instruments and environmental sounds--poses challenges distinct from those found in traditional Natural Language Processing scenarios. Nevertheless, Large Audio Models, epitomized by transformer-based architectures, have shown marked efficacy in this sphere. By leveraging massive amount of data, these models have demonstrated prowess in a variety of audio tasks, spanning from Automatic Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech to Music Generation, among others. Notably, recently these Foundational Audio Models, like SeamlessM4T, have started showing abilities to act as universal translators, supporting multiple speech tasks for up to 100 languages without any reliance on separate task-specific systems. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art methodologies regarding Foundational Large Audio Models, their performance benchmarks, and their applicability to real-world scenarios. We also highlight current limitations and provide insights into potential future research directions in the realm of Large Audio Models with the intent to spark further discussion, thereby fostering innovation in the next generation of audio-processing systems. Furthermore, to cope with the rapid development in this area, we will consistently update the relevant repository with relevant recent articles and their open-source implementations at https://github.com/EmulationAI/awesome-large-audio-models.
Playing Technique Detection by Fusing Note Onset Information in Guzheng Performance
The Guzheng is a kind of traditional Chinese instruments with diverse playing techniques. Instrument playing techniques (IPT) play an important role in musical performance. However, most of the existing works for IPT detection show low efficiency for variable-length audio and provide no assurance in the generalization as they rely on a single sound bank for training and testing. In this study, we propose an end-to-end Guzheng playing technique detection system using Fully Convolutional Networks that can be applied to variable-length audio. Because each Guzheng playing technique is applied to a note, a dedicated onset detector is trained to divide an audio into several notes and its predictions are fused with frame-wise IPT predictions. During fusion, we add the IPT predictions frame by frame inside each note and get the IPT with the highest probability within each note as the final output of that note. We create a new dataset named GZ_IsoTech from multiple sound banks and real-world recordings for Guzheng performance analysis. Our approach achieves 87.97% in frame-level accuracy and 80.76% in note-level F1-score, outperforming existing works by a large margin, which indicates the effectiveness of our proposed method in IPT detection.
Enhance Generation Quality of Flow Matching V2A Model via Multi-Step CoT-Like Guidance and Combined Preference Optimization
Creating high-quality sound effects from videos and text prompts requires precise alignment between visual and audio domains, both semantically and temporally, along with step-by-step guidance for professional audio generation. However, current state-of-the-art video-guided audio generation models often fall short of producing high-quality audio for both general and specialized use cases. To address this challenge, we introduce a multi-stage, multi-modal, end-to-end generative framework with Chain-of-Thought-like (CoT-like) guidance learning, termed Chain-of-Perform (CoP). First, we employ a transformer-based network architecture designed to achieve CoP guidance, enabling the generation of both general and professional audio. Second, we implement a multi-stage training framework that follows step-by-step guidance to ensure the generation of high-quality sound effects. Third, we develop a CoP multi-modal dataset, guided by video, to support step-by-step sound effects generation. Evaluation results highlight the advantages of the proposed multi-stage CoP generative framework compared to the state-of-the-art models on a variety of datasets, with FAD 0.79 to 0.74 (+6.33%), CLIP 16.12 to 17.70 (+9.80%) on VGGSound, SI-SDR 1.98dB to 3.35dB (+69.19%), MOS 2.94 to 3.49(+18.71%) on PianoYT-2h, and SI-SDR 2.22dB to 3.21dB (+44.59%), MOS 3.07 to 3.42 (+11.40%) on Piano-10h.
The Power of Sound (TPoS): Audio Reactive Video Generation with Stable Diffusion
In recent years, video generation has become a prominent generative tool and has drawn significant attention. However, there is little consideration in audio-to-video generation, though audio contains unique qualities like temporal semantics and magnitude. Hence, we propose The Power of Sound (TPoS) model to incorporate audio input that includes both changeable temporal semantics and magnitude. To generate video frames, TPoS utilizes a latent stable diffusion model with textual semantic information, which is then guided by the sequential audio embedding from our pretrained Audio Encoder. As a result, this method produces audio reactive video contents. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TPoS across various tasks and compare its results with current state-of-the-art techniques in the field of audio-to-video generation. More examples are available at https://ku-vai.github.io/TPoS/
ArtGPT-4: Artistic Vision-Language Understanding with Adapter-enhanced MiniGPT-4
In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing (NLP), with models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 achieving impressive capabilities in various linguistic tasks. However, training models on such a large scale is challenging, and finding datasets that match the model's scale is often difficult. Fine-tuning and training models with fewer parameters using novel methods have emerged as promising approaches to overcome these challenges. One such model is MiniGPT-4, which achieves comparable vision-language understanding to GPT-4 by leveraging novel pre-training models and innovative training strategies. However, the model still faces some challenges in image understanding, particularly in artistic pictures. A novel multimodal model called ArtGPT-4 has been proposed to address these limitations. ArtGPT-4 was trained on image-text pairs using a Tesla A100 device in just 2 hours, using only about 200 GB of data. The model can depict images with an artistic flair and generate visual code, including aesthetically pleasing HTML/CSS web pages. Furthermore, the article proposes novel benchmarks for evaluating the performance of vision-language models. In the subsequent evaluation methods, ArtGPT-4 scored more than 1 point higher than the current state-of-the-art model and was only 0.25 points lower than artists on a 6-point scale. Our code and pre-trained model are available at https://huggingface.co/Tyrannosaurus/ArtGPT-4.
Generative Pre-trained Transformer: A Comprehensive Review on Enabling Technologies, Potential Applications, Emerging Challenges, and Future Directions
The Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) represents a notable breakthrough in the domain of natural language processing, which is propelling us toward the development of machines that can understand and communicate using language in a manner that closely resembles that of humans. GPT is based on the transformer architecture, a deep neural network designed for natural language processing tasks. Due to their impressive performance on natural language processing tasks and ability to effectively converse, GPT have gained significant popularity among researchers and industrial communities, making them one of the most widely used and effective models in natural language processing and related fields, which motivated to conduct this review. This review provides a detailed overview of the GPT, including its architecture, working process, training procedures, enabling technologies, and its impact on various applications. In this review, we also explored the potential challenges and limitations of a GPT. Furthermore, we discuss potential solutions and future directions. Overall, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of GPT, enabling technologies, their impact on various applications, emerging challenges, and potential solutions.
GPT-4V(ision) as A Social Media Analysis Engine
Recent research has offered insights into the extraordinary capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in various general vision and language tasks. There is growing interest in how LMMs perform in more specialized domains. Social media content, inherently multimodal, blends text, images, videos, and sometimes audio. Understanding social multimedia content remains a challenging problem for contemporary machine learning frameworks. In this paper, we explore GPT-4V(ision)'s capabilities for social multimedia analysis. We select five representative tasks, including sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, fake news identification, demographic inference, and political ideology detection, to evaluate GPT-4V. Our investigation begins with a preliminary quantitative analysis for each task using existing benchmark datasets, followed by a careful review of the results and a selection of qualitative samples that illustrate GPT-4V's potential in understanding multimodal social media content. GPT-4V demonstrates remarkable efficacy in these tasks, showcasing strengths such as joint understanding of image-text pairs, contextual and cultural awareness, and extensive commonsense knowledge. Despite the overall impressive capacity of GPT-4V in the social media domain, there remain notable challenges. GPT-4V struggles with tasks involving multilingual social multimedia comprehension and has difficulties in generalizing to the latest trends in social media. Additionally, it exhibits a tendency to generate erroneous information in the context of evolving celebrity and politician knowledge, reflecting the known hallucination problem. The insights gleaned from our findings underscore a promising future for LMMs in enhancing our comprehension of social media content and its users through the analysis of multimodal information.
MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models
The recent GPT-4 has demonstrated extraordinary multi-modal abilities, such as directly generating websites from handwritten text and identifying humorous elements within images. These features are rarely observed in previous vision-language models. We believe the primary reason for GPT-4's advanced multi-modal generation capabilities lies in the utilization of a more advanced large language model (LLM). To examine this phenomenon, we present MiniGPT-4, which aligns a frozen visual encoder with a frozen LLM, Vicuna, using just one projection layer. Our findings reveal that MiniGPT-4 possesses many capabilities similar to those exhibited by GPT-4 like detailed image description generation and website creation from hand-written drafts. Furthermore, we also observe other emerging capabilities in MiniGPT-4, including writing stories and poems inspired by given images, providing solutions to problems shown in images, teaching users how to cook based on food photos, etc. In our experiment, we found that only performing the pretraining on raw image-text pairs could produce unnatural language outputs that lack coherency including repetition and fragmented sentences. To address this problem, we curate a high-quality, well-aligned dataset in the second stage to finetune our model using a conversational template. This step proved crucial for augmenting the model's generation reliability and overall usability. Notably, our model is highly computationally efficient, as we only train a projection layer utilizing approximately 5 million aligned image-text pairs. Our code, pre-trained model, and collected dataset are available at https://minigpt-4.github.io/.
Tell What You Hear From What You See -- Video to Audio Generation Through Text
The content of visual and audio scenes is multi-faceted such that a video can be paired with various audio and vice-versa. Thereby, in video-to-audio generation task, it is imperative to introduce steering approaches for controlling the generated audio. While Video-to-Audio generation is a well-established generative task, existing methods lack such controllability. In this work, we propose VATT, a multi-modal generative framework that takes a video and an optional text prompt as input, and generates audio and optional textual description of the audio. Such a framework has two advantages: i) Video-to-Audio generation process can be refined and controlled via text which complements the context of visual information, and ii) The model can suggest what audio to generate for the video by generating audio captions. VATT consists of two key modules: VATT Converter, a LLM that is fine-tuned for instructions and includes a projection layer that maps video features to the LLM vector space; and VATT Audio, a transformer that generates audio tokens from visual frames and from optional text prompt using iterative parallel decoding. The audio tokens are converted to a waveform by pretrained neural codec. Experiments show that when VATT is compared to existing video-to-audio generation methods in objective metrics, it achieves competitive performance when the audio caption is not provided. When the audio caption is provided as a prompt, VATT achieves even more refined performance (lowest KLD score of 1.41). Furthermore, subjective studies show that VATT Audio has been chosen as preferred generated audio than audio generated by existing methods. VATT enables controllable video-to-audio generation through text as well as suggesting text prompts for videos through audio captions, unlocking novel applications such as text-guided video-to-audio generation and video-to-audio captioning.
FineTuneBench: How well do commercial fine-tuning APIs infuse knowledge into LLMs?
There is great interest in fine-tuning frontier large language models (LLMs) to inject new information and update existing knowledge. While commercial LLM fine-tuning APIs from providers such as OpenAI and Google promise flexible adaptation for various applications, the efficacy of fine-tuning remains unclear. In this study, we introduce FineTuneBench, an evaluation framework and dataset for understanding how well commercial fine-tuning APIs can successfully learn new and updated knowledge. We analyze five frontier LLMs with commercially available fine-tuning APIs, including GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, on their effectiveness in two settings: (1) ingesting novel information, such as recent news events and new people profiles, and (2) updating existing knowledge, such as updated medical guidelines and code frameworks. Our results reveal substantial shortcomings in all the models' abilities to effectively learn new information through fine-tuning, with an average generalization accuracy of 37% across all models. When updating existing knowledge, such as incorporating medical guideline updates, commercial fine-tuning APIs show even more limited capability (average generalization accuracy of 19%). Overall, fine-tuning GPT-4o mini is the most effective for infusing new knowledge and updating knowledge, followed by GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4o. The fine-tuning APIs for Gemini 1.5 Flesh and Gemini 1.5 Pro are unable to learn new knowledge or update existing knowledge. These findings underscore a major shortcoming in using current commercial fine-tuning services to achieve reliable knowledge infusion in common scenarios. We open source the FineTuneBench dataset at https://github.com/kevinwu23/StanfordFineTuneBench.
Efficient Parallel Audio Generation using Group Masked Language Modeling
We present a fast and high-quality codec language model for parallel audio generation. While SoundStorm, a state-of-the-art parallel audio generation model, accelerates inference speed compared to autoregressive models, it still suffers from slow inference due to iterative sampling. To resolve this problem, we propose Group-Masked Language Modeling~(G-MLM) and Group Iterative Parallel Decoding~(G-IPD) for efficient parallel audio generation. Both the training and sampling schemes enable the model to synthesize high-quality audio with a small number of iterations by effectively modeling the group-wise conditional dependencies. In addition, our model employs a cross-attention-based architecture to capture the speaker style of the prompt voice and improves computational efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the baselines in prompt-based audio generation.
Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Models: Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities
Recent years have seen remarkable progress in both multimodal understanding models and image generation models. Despite their respective successes, these two domains have evolved independently, leading to distinct architectural paradigms: While autoregressive-based architectures have dominated multimodal understanding, diffusion-based models have become the cornerstone of image generation. Recently, there has been growing interest in developing unified frameworks that integrate these tasks. The emergence of GPT-4o's new capabilities exemplifies this trend, highlighting the potential for unification. However, the architectural differences between the two domains pose significant challenges. To provide a clear overview of current efforts toward unification, we present a comprehensive survey aimed at guiding future research. First, we introduce the foundational concepts and recent advancements in multimodal understanding and text-to-image generation models. Next, we review existing unified models, categorizing them into three main architectural paradigms: diffusion-based, autoregressive-based, and hybrid approaches that fuse autoregressive and diffusion mechanisms. For each category, we analyze the structural designs and innovations introduced by related works. Additionally, we compile datasets and benchmarks tailored for unified models, offering resources for future exploration. Finally, we discuss the key challenges facing this nascent field, including tokenization strategy, cross-modal attention, and data. As this area is still in its early stages, we anticipate rapid advancements and will regularly update this survey. Our goal is to inspire further research and provide a valuable reference for the community. The references associated with this survey are available on GitHub (https://github.com/AIDC-AI/Awesome-Unified-Multimodal-Models).
UniMoE-Audio: Unified Speech and Music Generation with Dynamic-Capacity MoE
Recent advances in unified multimodal models indicate a clear trend towards comprehensive content generation. However, the auditory domain remains a significant challenge, with music and speech often developed in isolation, hindering progress towards universal audio synthesis. This separation stems from inherent task conflicts and severe data imbalances, which impede the development of a truly unified audio generation model. To address this challenge, we propose UniMoE-Audio, a unified speech and music generation model within a novel Dynamic-Capacity Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework. Architecturally, UniMoE-Audio introduces a Top-P routing strategy for dynamic expert number allocation, and a hybrid expert design comprising routed experts for domain-specific knowledge, shared experts for domain-agnostic features, and null experts for adaptive computation skipping. To tackle data imbalance, we introduce a three-stage training curriculum: 1) Independent Specialist Training leverages original datasets to instill domain-specific knowledge into each "proto-expert" without interference; 2) MoE Integration and Warmup incorporates these specialists into the UniMoE-Audio architecture, warming up the gate module and shared expert using a subset of balanced dataset; and 3) Synergistic Joint Training trains the entire model end-to-end on the fully balanced dataset, fostering enhanced cross-domain synergy. Extensive experiments show that UniMoE-Audio not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on major speech and music generation benchmarks, but also demonstrates superior synergistic learning, mitigating the performance degradation typically seen in naive joint training. Our findings highlight the substantial potential of specialized MoE architecture and curated training strategies in advancing the field of universal audio generation. Homepage: https://mukioxun.github.io/Uni-MoE-site/home.html
PandaGPT: One Model To Instruction-Follow Them All
We present PandaGPT, an approach to emPower large lANguage moDels with visual and Auditory instruction-following capabilities. Our pilot experiments show that PandaGPT can perform complex tasks such as detailed image description generation, writing stories inspired by videos, and answering questions about audios. More interestingly, PandaGPT can take multimodal inputs simultaneously and compose their semantics naturally. For example, PandaGPT can connect how objects look in an image/video and how they sound in an audio. To do so, PandaGPT combines the multimodal encoders from ImageBind and the large language models from Vicuna. Notably, only aligned image-text pairs are required for the training of PandaGPT. Thanks to the strong capability of ImageBind in embedding data from different modalities into the same space, PandaGPT displays emergent, i.e. zero-shot, cross-modal behaviors for data other than image and text (e.g., video, audio, depth, thermal, and IMU). We hope that PandaGPT serves as an initial step toward building AGI that can perceive and understand inputs in different modalities holistically, as we humans do. Our project page is at https://panda-gpt.github.io/.
LogiCoT: Logical Chain-of-Thought Instruction-Tuning Data Collection with GPT-4
Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) demonstrates impressive chain-of-thought reasoning ability. Recent work on self-instruction tuning, such as Alpaca, has focused on enhancing the general proficiency of models. These instructions enable the model to achieve performance comparable to GPT-3.5 on general tasks like open-domain text generation and paraphrasing. However, they fall short of helping the model handle complex reasoning tasks. To bridge the gap, this paper presents LogiCoT, a new instruction-tuning dataset for Logical Chain-of-Thought reasoning with GPT-4. We elaborate on the process of harvesting instructions for prompting GPT-4 to generate chain-of-thought rationales. LogiCoT serves as an instruction set for teaching models of logical reasoning and elicits general reasoning skills.
SoloAudio: Target Sound Extraction with Language-oriented Audio Diffusion Transformer
In this paper, we introduce SoloAudio, a novel diffusion-based generative model for target sound extraction (TSE). Our approach trains latent diffusion models on audio, replacing the previous U-Net backbone with a skip-connected Transformer that operates on latent features. SoloAudio supports both audio-oriented and language-oriented TSE by utilizing a CLAP model as the feature extractor for target sounds. Furthermore, SoloAudio leverages synthetic audio generated by state-of-the-art text-to-audio models for training, demonstrating strong generalization to out-of-domain data and unseen sound events. We evaluate this approach on the FSD Kaggle 2018 mixture dataset and real data from AudioSet, where SoloAudio achieves the state-of-the-art results on both in-domain and out-of-domain data, and exhibits impressive zero-shot and few-shot capabilities. Source code and demos are released.
Is GPT-4 a Good Data Analyst?
As large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their powerful capabilities in plenty of domains and tasks, including context understanding, code generation, language generation, data storytelling, etc., many data analysts may raise concerns if their jobs will be replaced by AI. This controversial topic has drawn a lot of attention in public. However, we are still at a stage of divergent opinions without any definitive conclusion. Motivated by this, we raise the research question of "is GPT-4 a good data analyst?" in this work and aim to answer it by conducting head-to-head comparative studies. In detail, we regard GPT-4 as a data analyst to perform end-to-end data analysis with databases from a wide range of domains. We propose a framework to tackle the problems by carefully designing the prompts for GPT-4 to conduct experiments. We also design several task-specific evaluation metrics to systematically compare the performance between several professional human data analysts and GPT-4. Experimental results show that GPT-4 can achieve comparable performance to humans. We also provide in-depth discussions about our results to shed light on further studies before we reach the conclusion that GPT-4 can replace data analysts.
Freeze-Omni: A Smart and Low Latency Speech-to-speech Dialogue Model with Frozen LLM
Rapidly developing large language models (LLMs) have brought tremendous intelligent applications. Especially, the GPT-4o's excellent duplex speech interaction ability has brought impressive experience to users. Researchers have recently proposed several multi-modal LLMs in this direction that can achieve user-agent speech-to-speech conversations. This paper proposes a novel speech-text multimodal LLM architecture called Freeze-Omni. Our main contribution is that the speech input and output modalities can be easily connected to a textual LLM while keeping the LLM's parameters frozen throughout the training process. We design a three-stage training strategy for modeling both the speech input and output, enabling Freeze-Omni to obtain speech-to-speech conversation ability using text-speech paired data (such as ASR and TTS data) and only 60,000 multi-round text Q&A data on 8 GPUs. Moreover, we can effectively ensure that the intelligence of the Freeze-Omni in the speech modality is at the same level compared with that in the text modality of its backbone LLM, while achieving low latency end-to-end spoken response. In addition, we also designed a method to achieve duplex dialogue ability through multi-task training, giving Freeze-Omni a more natural style of dialogue ability between users and agents. In summary, Freeze-Omni holds great potential to conduct speech-to-speech dialogue based on a multimodal LLM under the condition of a frozen LLM, avoiding the catastrophic forgetting problem caused by limited data and training resources.
MIDI-GPT: A Controllable Generative Model for Computer-Assisted Multitrack Music Composition
We present and release MIDI-GPT, a generative system based on the Transformer architecture that is designed for computer-assisted music composition workflows. MIDI-GPT supports the infilling of musical material at the track and bar level, and can condition generation on attributes including: instrument type, musical style, note density, polyphony level, and note duration. In order to integrate these features, we employ an alternative representation for musical material, creating a time-ordered sequence of musical events for each track and concatenating several tracks into a single sequence, rather than using a single time-ordered sequence where the musical events corresponding to different tracks are interleaved. We also propose a variation of our representation allowing for expressiveness. We present experimental results that demonstrate that MIDI-GPT is able to consistently avoid duplicating the musical material it was trained on, generate music that is stylistically similar to the training dataset, and that attribute controls allow enforcing various constraints on the generated material. We also outline several real-world applications of MIDI-GPT, including collaborations with industry partners that explore the integration and evaluation of MIDI-GPT into commercial products, as well as several artistic works produced using it.
Ola: Pushing the Frontiers of Omni-Modal Language Model with Progressive Modality Alignment
Recent advances in large language models, particularly following GPT-4o, have sparked increasing interest in developing omni-modal models capable of understanding more modalities. While some open-source alternatives have emerged, there is still a notable lag behind specialized single-modality models in performance. In this paper, we present Ola, an Omni-modal language model that achieves competitive performance across image, video, and audio understanding compared to specialized counterparts. The core design of Ola lies in its progressive modality alignment strategy that extends the supporting modality of the language model progressively. Our training pipeline begins with the most distinct modalities: image and text, then gradually expands the skill sets of the model using speech data that connects language and audio knowledge, and video data that connects all modalities. The progressive learning pipeline also enables us to maintain a relatively small size of the cross-modal alignment data, making developing omni-modal from existing vision-language models easy and less costly. Moreover, to unlock an advanced interactive experience like GPT-4o, we further design a sentence-wise decoding solution for streaming speech generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ola surpasses existing open omni-modal LLMs across all modalities while achieving highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art specialized models of similar sizes. We aim to make Ola a fully open omni-modal understanding solution to advance future research in this emerging field. Model weights, code, and data are open-sourced at https://github.com/Ola-Omni/Ola.
MMMOS: Multi-domain Multi-axis Audio Quality Assessment
Accurate audio quality estimation is essential for developing and evaluating audio generation, retrieval, and enhancement systems. Existing non-intrusive assessment models predict a single Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for speech, merging diverse perceptual factors and failing to generalize beyond speech. We propose MMMOS, a no-reference, multi-domain audio quality assessment system that estimates four orthogonal axes: Production Quality, Production Complexity, Content Enjoyment, and Content Usefulness across speech, music, and environmental sounds. MMMOS fuses frame-level embeddings from three pretrained encoders (WavLM, MuQ, and M2D) and evaluates three aggregation strategies with four loss functions. By ensembling the top eight models, MMMOS shows a 20-30% reduction in mean squared error and a 4-5% increase in Kendall's {\tau} versus baseline, gains first place in six of eight Production Complexity metrics, and ranks among the top three on 17 of 32 challenge metrics.
AudioDec: An Open-source Streaming High-fidelity Neural Audio Codec
A good audio codec for live applications such as telecommunication is characterized by three key properties: (1) compression, i.e.\ the bitrate that is required to transmit the signal should be as low as possible; (2) latency, i.e.\ encoding and decoding the signal needs to be fast enough to enable communication without or with only minimal noticeable delay; and (3) reconstruction quality of the signal. In this work, we propose an open-source, streamable, and real-time neural audio codec that achieves strong performance along all three axes: it can reconstruct highly natural sounding 48~kHz speech signals while operating at only 12~kbps and running with less than 6~ms (GPU)/10~ms (CPU) latency. An efficient training paradigm is also demonstrated for developing such neural audio codecs for real-world scenarios. Both objective and subjective evaluations using the VCTK corpus are provided. To sum up, AudioDec is a well-developed plug-and-play benchmark for audio codec applications.
Automatic Evaluation for Text-to-image Generation: Task-decomposed Framework, Distilled Training, and Meta-evaluation Benchmark
Driven by the remarkable progress in diffusion models, text-to-image generation has made significant strides, creating a pressing demand for automatic quality evaluation of generated images. Current state-of-the-art automatic evaluation methods heavily rely on Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), particularly powerful commercial models like GPT-4o. While these models are highly effective, their substantial costs limit scalability in large-scale evaluations. Adopting open-source MLLMs is an alternative; however, their performance falls short due to significant limitations in processing multi-modal data compared to commercial MLLMs. To tackle these problems, we first propose a task decomposition evaluation framework based on GPT-4o to automatically construct a new training dataset, where the complex evaluation task is decoupled into simpler sub-tasks, effectively reducing the learning complexity. Based on this dataset, we design innovative training strategies to effectively distill GPT-4o's evaluation capabilities into a 7B open-source MLLM, MiniCPM-V-2.6. Furthermore, to reliably and comprehensively assess prior works and our proposed model, we manually annotate a meta-evaluation benchmark that includes chain-of-thought explanations alongside quality scores for generated images. Experimental results demonstrate that our distilled open-source MLLM significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art GPT-4o-base baseline, VIEScore, with over 4.6\% improvement in Spearman and Kendall correlations with human judgments.
Presto! Distilling Steps and Layers for Accelerating Music Generation
Despite advances in diffusion-based text-to-music (TTM) methods, efficient, high-quality generation remains a challenge. We introduce Presto!, an approach to inference acceleration for score-based diffusion transformers via reducing both sampling steps and cost per step. To reduce steps, we develop a new score-based distribution matching distillation (DMD) method for the EDM-family of diffusion models, the first GAN-based distillation method for TTM. To reduce the cost per step, we develop a simple, but powerful improvement to a recent layer distillation method that improves learning via better preserving hidden state variance. Finally, we combine our step and layer distillation methods together for a dual-faceted approach. We evaluate our step and layer distillation methods independently and show each yield best-in-class performance. Our combined distillation method can generate high-quality outputs with improved diversity, accelerating our base model by 10-18x (230/435ms latency for 32 second mono/stereo 44.1kHz, 15x faster than comparable SOTA) -- the fastest high-quality TTM to our knowledge. Sound examples can be found at https://presto-music.github.io/web/.
The Impact of Large Language Models on Scientific Discovery: a Preliminary Study using GPT-4
In recent years, groundbreaking advancements in natural language processing have culminated in the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs), which have showcased remarkable capabilities across a vast array of domains, including the understanding, generation, and translation of natural language, and even tasks that extend beyond language processing. In this report, we delve into the performance of LLMs within the context of scientific discovery, focusing on GPT-4, the state-of-the-art language model. Our investigation spans a diverse range of scientific areas encompassing drug discovery, biology, computational chemistry (density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD)), materials design, and partial differential equations (PDE). Evaluating GPT-4 on scientific tasks is crucial for uncovering its potential across various research domains, validating its domain-specific expertise, accelerating scientific progress, optimizing resource allocation, guiding future model development, and fostering interdisciplinary research. Our exploration methodology primarily consists of expert-driven case assessments, which offer qualitative insights into the model's comprehension of intricate scientific concepts and relationships, and occasionally benchmark testing, which quantitatively evaluates the model's capacity to solve well-defined domain-specific problems. Our preliminary exploration indicates that GPT-4 exhibits promising potential for a variety of scientific applications, demonstrating its aptitude for handling complex problem-solving and knowledge integration tasks. Broadly speaking, we evaluate GPT-4's knowledge base, scientific understanding, scientific numerical calculation abilities, and various scientific prediction capabilities.
IndexTTS2: A Breakthrough in Emotionally Expressive and Duration-Controlled Auto-Regressive Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech
Existing autoregressive large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) models have advantages in speech naturalness, but their token-by-token generation mechanism makes it difficult to precisely control the duration of synthesized speech. This becomes a significant limitation in applications requiring strict audio-visual synchronization, such as video dubbing. This paper introduces IndexTTS2, which proposes a novel, general, and autoregressive model-friendly method for speech duration control. The method supports two generation modes: one explicitly specifies the number of generated tokens to precisely control speech duration; the other freely generates speech in an autoregressive manner without specifying the number of tokens, while faithfully reproducing the prosodic features of the input prompt. Furthermore, IndexTTS2 achieves disentanglement between emotional expression and speaker identity, enabling independent control over timbre and emotion. In the zero-shot setting, the model can accurately reconstruct the target timbre (from the timbre prompt) while perfectly reproducing the specified emotional tone (from the style prompt). To enhance speech clarity in highly emotional expressions, we incorporate GPT latent representations and design a novel three-stage training paradigm to improve the stability of the generated speech. Additionally, to lower the barrier for emotional control, we designed a soft instruction mechanism based on text descriptions by fine-tuning Qwen3, effectively guiding the generation of speech with the desired emotional orientation. Finally, experimental results on multiple datasets show that IndexTTS2 outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS models in terms of word error rate, speaker similarity, and emotional fidelity. Audio samples are available at: https://index-tts.github.io/index-tts2.github.io/
EAT: Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Efficient Audio Transformer
Audio self-supervised learning (SSL) pre-training, which aims to learn good representations from unlabeled audio, has made remarkable progress. However, the extensive computational demands during pre-training pose a significant barrier to the potential application and optimization of audio SSL models. In this paper, inspired by the success of data2vec 2.0 in image modality and Audio-MAE in audio modality, we introduce Efficient Audio Transformer (EAT) to further improve the effectiveness and efficiency in audio SSL. The proposed EAT adopts the bootstrap self-supervised training paradigm to the audio domain. A novel Utterance-Frame Objective (UFO) is designed to enhance the modeling capability of acoustic events. Furthermore, we reveal that the masking strategy is critical in audio SSL pre-training, and superior audio representations can be obtained with large inverse block masks. Experiment results demonstrate that EAT achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on a range of audio-related tasks, including AudioSet (AS-2M, AS-20K), ESC-50, and SPC-2, along with a significant pre-training speedup up to ~15x compared to existing audio SSL models.
GPT-IMAGE-EDIT-1.5M: A Million-Scale, GPT-Generated Image Dataset
Recent advancements in large multimodal models like GPT-4o have set a new standard for high-fidelity, instruction-guided image editing. However, the proprietary nature of these models and their training data creates a significant barrier for open-source research. To bridge this gap, we introduce GPT-IMAGE-EDIT-1.5M, a publicly available, large-scale image-editing corpus containing more than 1.5 million high-quality triplets (instruction, source image, edited image). We systematically construct this dataset by leveraging the versatile capabilities of GPT-4o to unify and refine three popular image-editing datasets: OmniEdit, HQ-Edit, and UltraEdit. Specifically, our methodology involves 1) regenerating output images to enhance visual quality and instruction alignment, and 2) selectively rewriting prompts to improve semantic clarity. To validate the efficacy of our dataset, we fine-tune advanced open-source models on GPT-IMAGE-EDIT-1.5M. The empirical results are exciting, e.g., the fine-tuned FluxKontext achieves highly competitive performance across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks, including 7.24 on GEdit-EN, 3.80 on ImgEdit-Full, and 8.78 on Complex-Edit, showing stronger instruction following and higher perceptual quality while maintaining identity. These scores markedly exceed all previously published open-source methods and substantially narrow the gap to leading proprietary models. We hope the full release of GPT-IMAGE-EDIT-1.5M can help to catalyze further open research in instruction-guided image editing.
Accuracy of a Vision-Language Model on Challenging Medical Cases
Background: General-purpose large language models that utilize both text and images have not been evaluated on a diverse array of challenging medical cases. Methods: Using 934 cases from the NEJM Image Challenge published between 2005 and 2023, we evaluated the accuracy of the recently released Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 with Vision model (GPT-4V) compared to human respondents overall and stratified by question difficulty, image type, and skin tone. We further conducted a physician evaluation of GPT-4V on 69 NEJM clinicopathological conferences (CPCs). Analyses were conducted for models utilizing text alone, images alone, and both text and images. Results: GPT-4V achieved an overall accuracy of 61% (95% CI, 58 to 64%) compared to 49% (95% CI, 49 to 50%) for humans. GPT-4V outperformed humans at all levels of difficulty and disagreement, skin tones, and image types; the exception was radiographic images, where performance was equivalent between GPT-4V and human respondents. Longer, more informative captions were associated with improved performance for GPT-4V but similar performance for human respondents. GPT-4V included the correct diagnosis in its differential for 80% (95% CI, 68 to 88%) of CPCs when using text alone, compared to 58% (95% CI, 45 to 70%) of CPCs when using both images and text. Conclusions: GPT-4V outperformed human respondents on challenging medical cases and was able to synthesize information from both images and text, but performance deteriorated when images were added to highly informative text. Overall, our results suggest that multimodal AI models may be useful in medical diagnostic reasoning but that their accuracy may depend heavily on context.
Making Acoustic Side-Channel Attacks on Noisy Keyboards Viable with LLM-Assisted Spectrograms' "Typo" Correction
The large integration of microphones into devices increases the opportunities for Acoustic Side-Channel Attacks (ASCAs), as these can be used to capture keystrokes' audio signals that might reveal sensitive information. However, the current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) models for ASCAs, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and hybrid models, such as CoAtNet, still exhibit limited robustness under realistic noisy conditions. Solving this problem requires either: (i) an increased model's capacity to infer contextual information from longer sequences, allowing the model to learn that an initially noisily typed word is the same as a futurely collected non-noisy word, or (ii) an approach to fix misidentified information from the contexts, as one does not type random words, but the ones that best fit the conversation context. In this paper, we demonstrate that both strategies are viable and complementary solutions for making ASCAs practical. We observed that no existing solution leverages advanced transformer architectures' power for these tasks and propose that: (i) Visual Transformers (VTs) are the candidate solutions for capturing long-term contextual information and (ii) transformer-powered Large Language Models (LLMs) are the candidate solutions to fix the ``typos'' (mispredictions) the model might make. Thus, we here present the first-of-its-kind approach that integrates VTs and LLMs for ASCAs. We first show that VTs achieve SOTA performance in classifying keystrokes when compared to the previous CNN benchmark. Second, we demonstrate that LLMs can mitigate the impact of real-world noise. Evaluations on the natural sentences revealed that: (i) incorporating LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o) in our ASCA pipeline boosts the performance of error-correction tasks; and (ii) the comparable performance can be attained by a lightweight, fine-tuned smaller LLM (67 times smaller than GPT-4o), using...
PicoAudio2: Temporal Controllable Text-to-Audio Generation with Natural Language Description
While recent work in controllable text-to-audio (TTA) generation has achieved fine-grained control through timestamp conditioning, its scope remains limited by audio quality and input format. These models often suffer from poor audio quality in real datasets due to sole reliance on synthetic data. Moreover, some models are constrained to a closed vocabulary of sound events, preventing them from controlling audio generation for open-ended, free-text queries. This paper introduces PicoAudio2, a framework that advances temporal-controllable TTA by mitigating these data and architectural limitations. Specifically, we use a grounding model to annotate event timestamps of real audio-text datasets to curate temporally-strong real data, in addition to simulation data from existing works. The model is trained on the combination of real and simulation data. Moreover, we propose an enhanced architecture that integrates the fine-grained information from a timestamp matrix with coarse-grained free-text input. Experiments show that PicoAudio2 exhibits superior performance in terms of temporal controllability and audio quality.
GPT-4o: Visual perception performance of multimodal large language models in piglet activity understanding
Animal ethology is an crucial aspect of animal research, and animal behavior labeling is the foundation for studying animal behavior. This process typically involves labeling video clips with behavioral semantic tags, a task that is complex, subjective, and multimodal. With the rapid development of multimodal large language models(LLMs), new application have emerged for animal behavior understanding tasks in livestock scenarios. This study evaluates the visual perception capabilities of multimodal LLMs in animal activity recognition. To achieve this, we created piglet test data comprising close-up video clips of individual piglets and annotated full-shot video clips. These data were used to assess the performance of four multimodal LLMs-Video-LLaMA, MiniGPT4-Video, Video-Chat2, and GPT-4 omni (GPT-4o)-in piglet activity understanding. Through comprehensive evaluation across five dimensions, including counting, actor referring, semantic correspondence, time perception, and robustness, we found that while current multimodal LLMs require improvement in semantic correspondence and time perception, they have initially demonstrated visual perception capabilities for animal activity recognition. Notably, GPT-4o showed outstanding performance, with Video-Chat2 and GPT-4o exhibiting significantly better semantic correspondence and time perception in close-up video clips compared to full-shot clips. The initial evaluation experiments in this study validate the potential of multimodal large language models in livestock scene video understanding and provide new directions and references for future research on animal behavior video understanding. Furthermore, by deeply exploring the influence of visual prompts on multimodal large language models, we expect to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of animal behavior recognition in livestock scenarios through human visual processing methods.
Audiobox: Unified Audio Generation with Natural Language Prompts
Audio is an essential part of our life, but creating it often requires expertise and is time-consuming. Research communities have made great progress over the past year advancing the performance of large scale audio generative models for a single modality (speech, sound, or music) through adopting more powerful generative models and scaling data. However, these models lack controllability in several aspects: speech generation models cannot synthesize novel styles based on text description and are limited on domain coverage such as outdoor environments; sound generation models only provide coarse-grained control based on descriptions like "a person speaking" and would only generate mumbling human voices. This paper presents Audiobox, a unified model based on flow-matching that is capable of generating various audio modalities. We design description-based and example-based prompting to enhance controllability and unify speech and sound generation paradigms. We allow transcript, vocal, and other audio styles to be controlled independently when generating speech. To improve model generalization with limited labels, we adapt a self-supervised infilling objective to pre-train on large quantities of unlabeled audio. Audiobox sets new benchmarks on speech and sound generation (0.745 similarity on Librispeech for zero-shot TTS; 0.77 FAD on AudioCaps for text-to-sound) and unlocks new methods for generating audio with novel vocal and acoustic styles. We further integrate Bespoke Solvers, which speeds up generation by over 25 times compared to the default ODE solver for flow-matching, without loss of performance on several tasks. Our demo is available at https://audiobox.metademolab.com/
Can GPT-4 Perform Neural Architecture Search?
We investigate the potential of GPT-4~gpt4 to perform Neural Architecture Search (NAS) -- the task of designing effective neural architectures. Our proposed approach, GPT-4 Enhanced Neural archItectUre Search (GENIUS), leverages the generative capabilities of GPT-4 as a black-box optimiser to quickly navigate the architecture search space, pinpoint promising candidates, and iteratively refine these candidates to improve performance. We assess GENIUS across several benchmarks, comparing it with existing state-of-the-art NAS techniques to illustrate its effectiveness. Rather than targeting state-of-the-art performance, our objective is to highlight GPT-4's potential to assist research on a challenging technical problem through a simple prompting scheme that requires relatively limited domain expertiseCode available at \href{https://github.com/mingkai-zheng/GENIUS{https://github.com/mingkai-zheng/GENIUS}.}. More broadly, we believe our preliminary results point to future research that harnesses general purpose language models for diverse optimisation tasks. We also highlight important limitations to our study, and note implications for AI safety.
