Zero-shot Emotional Voice Conversion (EVC) aims to transform a speaker’s emotional state to match a target emotion, even for speakers and emotion categories that were not encountered during training, thereby enhancing the generalization ability of traditional EVC systems. Despite advancements in the field, existing methods often face challenges in preserving speaker identity and ensuring the naturalness of emotional expression, particularly in the context of rhythm modeling. To this end, we propose the Zero-Shot Emotion Voice Conversion (ZSEVC) model, which leverages self-supervised learning for speaker adaptation and duration prediction. To adjust speech rhythm in alignment with the target emotional state, we introduce a rhythm-aware content encoder that captures and refines discrete speech units at a finer granularity. Additionally, a hierarchical emotion fusion scheme is employed to integrate emotional features with content features, enhancing both pronunciation accuracy and emotional expressiveness. Moreover, a residual speaker-emotion fusion module is incorporated to better adapt speaker characteristics to emotional prosodic variation. Experimental results show ZSEVC’s superior performance in terms of naturalness and speaker similarity in zero-shot scenario, successfully generating emotional speeches for unseen emotions and speakers. Speech samples are available at https://wosyoo.github.io/ZSEVC.

Asynchronous Video Interviews (AVIs) allow candidates to record responses to predefined questions using digital devices, offering both flexibility and remote accessibility. Assessing personality traits and interview performance via AVIs provides organizations with valuable insights into candidate profiles and facilitates the prediction of future job performance. However, prior benchmark challenges, whose datasets were predominantly sourced from social media, suffer from suboptimal construct and methodological validity, limiting their utility for model development and real-world applications. To address these limitations, we introduce the AVI Grand Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2025, featuring a novel dataset of mock AVIs comprising 3,876 videos from 646 participants in a simulated job application procedure. Interview questions were carefully designed to reflect real-world selection contexts and elicit personality expressions grounded in Trait Activation Theory. Personality traits and job competencies were annotated by trained evaluators and professional recruiters, ensuring both methodological rigor and ecological validity. The solutions and algorithms developed in this challenge are analyzed and summarized in this paper to foster the development of fair, reliable, and AI-driven hiring assessments.

Text-to-Speech (TTS) aims to convert the input text to a human-like voice. With the development of deep learning, encoder-decoder based TTS models perform superior performance, in terms of naturalness, in mainstream languages such as Chinese, English, etc. Note that the linguistic information learning capability of the text encoder is the key. However, for TTS of low-resource agglutinative languages, the scale of the$< $text, speech$>$paired data is limited. Therefore, how to extract rich linguistic information from small-scale text data to enhance the naturalness of the synthesized speech, is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed. In this paper, we first collect a large unsupervised text data for BERT-like language model pre-training, and then adopt the trained language model to extract deep linguistic information for the input text of the TTS model to improve the naturalness of the final synthesized speech. It should be emphasized that in order to fully exploit the prosody-related linguistic information in agglutinative languages, we incorporated morphological information into the language model training and constructed a morphology-aware masking based BERT model (MAM-BERT). Experimental results based on various advanced TTS models validate the effectiveness of our approach. Further comparison of the various data scales also validates the effectiveness of our approach in low-resource scenarios.

Image-to-image translation methods have progressed from only considering the image-level information to integrating the global- and instance-level information. However, only the foreground instances are refined, and the background semantics are taken as an entire feature, which causes a substantial loss of the semantic information in the translation. Additionally, the insufficient quality of the translated semantic regions also leads to an unsatisfactory performance of the object recognition or visual odometry tasks in which the translated images/videos are further used. In this paper, we propose a novel generative adversarial network for panoptic-level image-to-image translation (PanopticGAN). The proposed method has three advantages: 1) the extracted panoptic perception (i.e., the foreground instances and background semantic regions) as content codes are aligned with the sampled panoptic style codes, which considers the panoptic-level information to avoid the semantic information loss, and the latent space of each object has a rich fusion of content and style codes to generate the higher-fidelity results; 2) a feature masking module is proposed to extract the representations within each object contour by masks for sharpening the object boundaries; 3) the improved fidelity of the translated semantic regions further contributes to enhancing the performance of the object recognition or visual odometry tasks that the translated images/videos are used in. In this paper, we also annotate a compact panoptic segmentation dataset for the thermal-to-color translation task. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our PanopticGAN over the latest methods.

Despite remarkable progress in image translation, the complex scene with multiple discrepant objects remains a challenging problem. The translated images have low fidelity and tiny objects in fewer details causing unsatisfactory performance in object recognition. Without thorough object perception (i.e., bounding boxes, categories, and masks) of images as prior knowledge, the style transformation of each object will be difficult to track in translation. We propose panoptic-aware generative adversarial networks (PanopticGAN) for image-to-image translation together with a compact panoptic segmentation dataset. The panoptic perception (i.e., foreground instances and background semantics of the image scene) is extracted to achieve alignment between object content codes of the input domain and panoptic-level style codes sampled from the target style space, then refined by a proposed feature masking module for sharping object boundaries. The image-level combination between content and sampled style codes is also merged for higher fidelity image generation. Our proposed method was systematically compared with different competing methods and obtained significant improvement in both image quality and object recognition performance.

Emotional voice conversion (VC) aims to convert a neutral voice to an emotional one while retaining the linguistic information and speaker identity. We note that the decoupling of emotional features from other speech information (such as content, speaker identity, etc.) is the key to achieving promising performance. Some recent attempts of speech representation decoupling on the neutral speech cannot work well on the emotional speech, due to the more complex entanglement of acoustic properties in the latter. To address this problem, here we propose a novel Source-Filter-based Emotional VC model (SFEVC) to achieve proper filtering of speaker-independent emotion cues from both the timbre and pitch features. Our SFEVC model consists of multi-channel encoders, emotion separate encoders, pre-trained speaker-dependent encoders, and the corresponding decoder. Note that all encoder modules adopt a designed information bottleneck auto-encoder. Additionally, to further improve the conversion quality for various emotions, a novel training strategy based on the 2D Valence-Arousal (VA) space is proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed SFEVC along with a VA training strategy outperforms all baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in speaker-independent emotional VC with nonparallel data.

Emotion represents an essential aspect of human speech that is manifested in speech prosody.Speech, visual, and textual cues are complementary in human communication.In this paper, we study a hybrid fusion method, referred to as multi-modal attention network (MMAN) to make use of visual and textual cues in speech emotion recognition.We propose a novel multimodal attention mechanism, cLSTM-MMA, which facilitates the attention across three modalities and selectively fuse the information.cLSTM-MMA is fused with other uni-modal subnetworks in the late fusion.The experiments show that speech emotion recognition benefits significantly from visual and textual cues, and the proposed cLSTM-MMA alone is as competitive as other fusion methods in terms of accuracy, but with a much more compact network structure.The proposed hybrid network MMAN achieves state-of-the-art performance on IEMOCAP database for emotion recognition.

In emotional voice conversion (VC) tasks, it is difficult to deal with a simple representation of fundamental frequency (F0), which is the most important feature in emotional voice representation. In order to address this issue, we propose the adaptive scales continuous wavelet transform (ADS-CWT) method to systematically capture F0 features of different temporal levels, which can represent different prosodic aspects, ranging from micro-prosody to sentences. Moreover, in an emotional VC task, each dataset is paired with the labeled emotional voice and neutral voice, which can be regarded as a dual task. Owing to, first, dual supervised learning's ability to improve the training performances by using the leveraging probabilistic connection between the dual tasks to enhance the learning from labeled data and, second, generative adversarial networks' (GANs') ability to mitigate the over-smoothing problem caused in the low-level data space when converting the acoustic features, we further present a novel training framework for emotional VC using GANs combined with dual supervised learning, named as dual supervised adversarial networks. In emotional VC experiments, we confirmed the high similarity performance of our method when using limited labeled data for emotional VC. Our method achieves good and consistent performance, in both objective and subjective evaluations.

The choice of image feature representation plays a crucial role in the analysis of visual information. Although vast numbers of alternative robust feature representation models have been proposed to improve the performance of different visual tasks, most existing feature representations [e.g., handcrafted features or convolutional neural networks (CNNs)] have a relatively limited capacity to capture the highly orientation-invariant (rotation/reversal) features. The net consequence is suboptimal visual performance. To address these problems, this study adopts a novel transformational approach, which investigates the potential of using polar feature representations. Our low level consists of a histogram of oriented gradient, which is then binned using annular spatial bin-type cells applied to the polar gradient. This gives gradient binning invariance for feature extraction. In this way, the descriptors have significantly enhanced orientation-invariant capabilities. The proposed feature representation, calledorientation-invariant histograms of oriented gradients, is capable of accurately processing visual tasks (e.g., facial expression recognition). In the context of the CNN architecture, we propose two polar convolution operations, referred to as full polar convolution and local polar convolution, and use these to develop polar architectures for the CNN orientation-invariant representation. Experimental results show that the proposed orientation-invariant image representation, based on polar models for both handcrafted features and deep learning features, is both competitive with state-of-the-art methods and maintains compact representation on a set of challenging benchmark image datasets.

This paper proposes a novel approach based on a supervised Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) model that forecasts the crude oil prices with Adaptive Scales Continuous Wavelet Transform (AS-CWT). In our study, we first confirmed that the possibility of using Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) to decompose an oil price series into various components, such as the sequence of days, weeks, months and years, so that the decomposed new time series can be used as inputs for a deep-learning (DL) training model. Second, we find that applying the proposed adaptive scales in the CWT method can strengthen the dependence of inputs and provide more useful information, which can improve the forecasting performance. Finally, we use the supervised GANs model as a training model, which can provide more accurate forecasts than those of the naive forecast (NF) model and other nonlinear models, such as Neural Networks (NNs), and Deep Belief Networks (DBNs) when dealing with a limited amount of oil prices data.

Video emotion recognition as an emerging research field has been attracting more and more focus in recent years. However, such work is quite challenging, since human emotions are hard to differentiate precisely due to its complexity and diversity, moreover, the expressions of sentiment in a content-rich video are sparse. Previous studies presented a number of approaches to try to learn human emotions on video level by exploiting various video features. However, most of works just used simple low-level video features such as hand-crafted image features, and they also did not consider the further latent connections among different multimodal data within a video. To tackle these problems, we develop a novel Bayesian non-parametric multimodal data modeling framework to learn the emotions from video, where the adopted image data are deep features extracted from key frames of video via convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and the adopted audio data are Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features. In this framework, we then use a symmetric correspondence hierarchical Dirichlet processes (Sym-cHDP) model to mine their latent emotional events (topics) between image features and audio features. Finally, the effectiveness of our framework is demonstrated via comprehensive experimentations.

An artificial neural network is one of the most important models for training features in a voice conversion task. Typically, Neural Networks (NNs) are not effective in processing low-dimensional F0 features, thus this causes that the performance of those methods based on neural networks for training Mel Cepstral Coefficients (MCC) are not outstanding. However, F0 can robustly represent various prosody signals (e.g., emotional prosody). In this study, we propose an effective method based on the NNs to train the normalized-segment-F0 features (NSF0) for emotional prosody conversion. Meanwhile, the proposed method adopts deep belief networks (DBNs) to train spectrum features for voice conversion. By using these approaches, the proposed method can change the spectrum and the prosody for the emotional voice at the same time. Moreover, the experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for voice emotional conversion.