While language models (LMs) paired with residual vector quantization (RVQ) tokenizers have shown promise in text-to-audio (T2A) generation, they still lag behind diffusion-based models by a non-trivial margin.We identify a critical dilemma underpinning this gap: incorporating more RVQ layers improves audio reconstruction fidelity but exceeds the generation capacity of conventional LMs.To address this, we first analyze RVQ dynamics and uncover two key limitations: 1) orthogonality of features across RVQ layers hinders effective LMs training, and 2) descending semantic richness in tokens from deeper RVQ layers exacerbates exposure bias during autoregressive decoding.Based on these insights, we propose Siren, a novel LM-based framework that employs multiple isolated transformers with causal conditioning and anti-causal alignment via reinforcement learning.Extensive experiments demonstrate that Siren outperforms both existing LM-based and diffusion-based T2A systems, achieving state-of-the-art results.By bridging the representational strengths of LMs with the fidelity demands of audio synthesis, our approach repositions LMs as competitive contenders against diffusion models in T2A tasks.Moreover, by aligning audio representations with linguistic structures, Siren facilitates a promising pathway toward unified multimodal generation frameworks.The code is released at https://github.com/wjc2830/Siren.git.

The field of face recognition (FR) has undergone significant advancements with the rise of deep learning. Recently, the success of unsupervised learning and graph neural networks has demonstrated the effectiveness of data structure information. Considering that the FR task can leverage large-scale training data, which intrinsically contains significant structure information, we aim to investigate how to encode such critical structure information into the latent space. As revealed from our observations, directly aligning the structure information between the input and latent spaces inevitably suffers from an overfitting problem, leading to a structure collapse phenomenon in the latent space. To address this problem, we propose TopoFR, a novel FR model that leverages a topological structure alignment strategy called PTSA and a hard sample mining strategy named SDE. Concretely, PTSA uses persistent homology to align the topological structures of the input and latent spaces, effectively preserving the structure information and improving the generalization performance of FR model. To mitigate the impact of hard samples on the latent space structure, SDE accurately identifies hard samples by automatically computing structure damage score (SDS) for each sample, and directs the model to prioritize optimizing these samples. Experimental results on popular face benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our TopoFR over the state-of-the-art methods. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/modelscope/facechain/tree/main/face_module/TopoFR.

Recent breakthroughs in semi-supervised semantic segmentation have been developed through contrastive learning. In prevalent pixel-wise contrastive learning solutions, the model maps pixels to deterministic representations and regularizes them in the latent space. However, there exist inaccurate pseudo-labels which map the ambiguous representations of pixels to the wrong classes due to the limited cognitive ability of the model. In this paper, we define pixel-wise representations from a new perspective of probability theory and propose a Probabilistic Representation Contrastive Learning (PRCL) framework that improves representation quality by taking its probability into consideration. Through modelling the mapping from pixels to representations as the probability via multivariate Gaussian distributions, we can tune the contribution of the ambiguous representations to tolerate the risk of inaccurate pseudo-labels. Furthermore, we define prototypes in the form of distributions, which indicates the confidence of a class, while the point prototype cannot. More- over, we propose to regularize the distribution variance to enhance the reliability of representations. Taking advantage of these benefits, high-quality feature representations can be derived in the latent space, thereby the performance of se- mantic segmentation can be further improved. We conduct sufficient experiment to evaluate PRCL on Pascal VOC and CityScapes to demonstrate its superiority. The code is available at https://github.com/Haoyu-Xie/PRCL.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated powerful representation ability in various visual tasks thanks to their intrinsic data-hungry nature. However, we unexpectedly find that ViTs perform vulnerably when applied to face recognition (FR) scenarios with extremely large datasets. We investigate the reasons for this phenomenon and discover that the existing data augmentation approach and hard sample mining strategy are incompatible with ViTs-based FR backbone due to the lack of tailored consideration on preserving face structural information and leveraging each local token information. To remedy these problems, this paper proposes a superior FR model called TransFace, which employs a patch-level data augmentation strategy named DPAP and a hard sample mining strategy named EHSM. Specially, DPAP randomly perturbs the amplitude information of dominant patches to expand sample diversity, which effectively alleviates the overfitting problem in ViTs. EHSM utilizes the information entropy in the local tokens to dynamically adjust the importance weight of easy and hard samples during training, leading to a more stable prediction. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our TransFace. Code and models are available at https://github.com/DanJun6737/TransFace.

Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation (S4) aims to train a segmentation model with limited labeled images and a substantial volume of unlabeled images. To improve the robustness of representations, powerful methods introduce a pixel-wise contrastive learning approach in latent space (i.e., representation space) that aggregates the representations to their prototypes in a fully supervised manner. However, previous contrastive-based S4 methods merely rely on the supervision from the model’s output (logits) in logit space during unlabeled training. In contrast, we utilize the outputs in both logit space and representation space to obtain supervision in a collaborative way. The supervision from two spaces plays two roles: 1) reduces the risk of over-fitting to incorrect semantic information in logits with the help of representations; 2) enhances the knowledge exchange between the two spaces. Furthermore, unlike previous approaches, we use the similarity between representations and prototypes as a new indicator to tilt training those under-performing representations and achieve a more efficient contrastive learning process. Results on two public benchmarks demonstrate the competitive performance of our method compared with state-of-the-art methods.