Generating expressive and controllable human speech is one of the core goals of generative artificial intelligence, but its progress has long been constrained by two fundamental challenges: the deep entanglement of speech factors and the coarse granularity of existing control mechanisms. To overcome these challenges, we have proposed a novel framework called MF-Speech, which consists of two core components: MF-SpeechEncoder and MF-SpeechGenerator. MF-SpeechEncoder acts as a factor purifier, adopting a multi-objective optimization strategy to decompose the original speech signal into highly pure and independent representations of content, timbre, and emotion. Subsequently, MF-SpeechGenerator functions as a conductor, achieving precise, composable and fine-grained control over these factors through dynamic fusion and Hierarchical Style Adaptive Normalization (HSAN). Experiments demonstrate that in the highly challenging multi-factor compositional speech generation task, MF-Speech significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, achieving a lower word error rate (WER=4.67%), superior style control (SECS=0.5685, Corr=0.68), and the highest subjective evaluation scores (nMOS=3.96, sMOS_t=3.86, sMOS_e=3.78). Furthermore, the learned discrete factors exhibit strong transferability, demonstrating their significant potential as a general-purpose speech representation.

Role-playing language models (RPLMs) have made significant strides in mimicking static character identities.However, their personality simulations remain superficial, lacking a profound understanding of complex human psychological mechanisms.We identify a critical bottleneck termed "Personality Inertia"-a behavioral rigidity where RLHF-induced alignment bias traps models in a sanitized, "helpful assistant" persona.This inertia prevents models from adapting to diverse social contexts or expressing essential but negative traits under pressure.To bridge this gap, we propose PD-LLM, a situation-aware framework grounded in Trait Activation Theory.PD-LLM introduces Bipolar Latent Decomposition, which decouples personality traits into bidirectional LoRA adapters.These adapters are dynamically modulated by a situation-aware module based on the DIAMONDS taxonomy, allowing for precise behavioral regulation.Empirical results show that while baseline methods fail to synchronize multidimensional traits under pressure, PD-LLM achieves superior performance in both static fidelity and dynamic adaptability.By advancing from prompt engineering to intrinsic parameter control, PD-LLM effectively overcomes personality rigidity, facilitating the creation of vivid and psychologically consistent agents.

Variational Autoencoder (VAE) aims to compress pixel data into low-dimensional latent space, playing an important role in OpenAI’s Sora and other latent video diffusion generation models. While most existing video VAEs inflate a pre-trained image VAE into the 3D causal structure for temporal-spatial compression, this paper presents two astonishing findings: (1) The initialization from a well-trained image VAE with the same latent dimensions is not an optimal scheme. (2) The adoption of causal reasoning leads to unequal information interactions and unbalanced performance between frames. To alleviate these problems, we propose a keyframe-based temporal compression (KTC) architecture and a group causal convolution (GCConv) module to further improve video VAE (IV-VAE). Specifically, the KTC architecture divides the latent space into two branches, in which one half completely inherits the compression prior of keyframes from a lower-dimension image VAE while the other half involves temporal compression through 3D group causal convolution, reducing temporal-spatial conflicts and accelerating the convergence speed of video VAE. The GC-Conv in the above 3D half uses standard convolution within each frame group to ensure inter-frame equivalence, and employs causal logical padding between groups to maintain flexibility in processing variable frame video. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate the SOTA video reconstruction and generation abilities of our IV-VAE.

Advancements in large Vision-Language Models have brought precise, accurate image captioning, vital for advancing multi-modal image understanding and processing. Yet these captions often carry lengthy, intertwined contexts that are difficult to parse and frequently overlook essential cues, posing a great barrier for models like GroundingDINO and SDXL, which lack the strong text encoding and syntax analysis needed to fully leverage dense captions. To address this, we propose BACON, a prompting method that breaks down VLM-generated captions into disentangled, structured elements such as objects, relationships, styles, and themes. This approach not only minimizes confusion from handling complex contexts but also allows for efficient transfer into a JSON dictionary, enabling models without linguistic processing capabilities to easily access key information. We annotated 100,000 image-caption pairs using BACON with GPT-4V and trained an LLaVA captioner on this dataset, enabling it to produce BACON-style captions without relying on costly GPT-4V. Evaluations of overall quality, precision, and recall—as well as user studies—demonstrate that the resulting caption model consistently outperforms other SOTA VLM models in generating high-quality captions. Besides, we show that BACON-style captions exhibit better clarity when applied to various models, enabling them to accomplish previously unattainable tasks or surpass existing SOTA solutions without training. For example, BACON-style captions help GroundingDINO achieve 1.51× higher recall scores on open-vocabulary object detection tasks compared to leading methods.

3D human digitization has long been a highly pursued yet challenging task. Existing methods aim to generate high-quality 3D digital humans from single or multiple views, but remain primarily constrained by current paradigms and the scarcity of 3D human assets. Specifically, recent approaches fall into several paradigms: optimization-based and feed-forward (both single-view regression and multi-view generation with reconstruction). However, they are limited by slow speed, low quality, cascade reasoning, and ambiguity in mapping low-dimensional planes to high-dimensional space due to occlusion and invisibility, respectively. Furthermore, existing 3D human assets remain small-scale, insufficient for large-scale training. To address these challenges, we propose a latent space generation paradigm for 3D human digitization, which involves compressing multi-view images into Gaussians via a UV-structured VAE, along with DiT-based conditional generation, we transform the ill-posed low-to-high-dimensional mapping problem into a learnable distribution shift, which also supports end-to-end inference. In addition, we employ the multi-view optimization approach combined with synthetic data to construct the HGS-1M dataset, which contains $1$ million 3D Gaussian assets to support the large-scale training. Experimental results demonstrate that our paradigm, powered by large-scale training, produces high-quality 3D human Gaussians with intricate textures, facial details, and loose clothing deformation.

In the realm of image generation, the quest for realism and customization has never been more pressing. While existing methods like concept sliders have made strides, they often falter when it comes to non-AIGC images, particularly images captured in real-world settings. To bridge this gap, we introduce Beyond Sliders, an innovative framework that integrates GANs and diffusion models to facilitate sophisticated image manipulation across diverse image categories. Improved upon concept sliders, our method refines the image through fine-grained guidance—both textual and visual—in an adversarial manner, leading to a marked enhancement in image quality and realism. Extensive experimental validation confirms the robustness and versatility of Beyond Sliders across a spectrum of applications.

Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) is a challenging task aiming to localize objects with only image-level supervision. Recent works apply visual transformer to WSOL and achieve significant success by exploiting the long-range feature dependency in self-attention mechanism. However, existing transformer-based methods synthesize the classification feature maps as the localization map, which leads to optimization conflicts between classification and localization tasks. To address this problem, we propose to learn a task-specific spatial-aware token (SAT) to condition localization in a weakly supervised manner. Specifically, a spatial token is first introduced in the input space to aggregate representations for localization task. Then a spatial aware attention module is constructed, which allows spatial token to generate foreground probabilities of different patches by querying and to extract localization knowledge from the classification task. Besides, for the problem of sparse and unbalanced pixel-level supervision obtained from the image-level label, two spatial constraints, including batch area loss and normalization loss, are designed to compensate and enhance this supervision. Experiments show that the proposed SAT achieves state-of-the-art performance on both CUB-200 and ImageNet, with 98.45% and 73.13% GT-known Loc, respectively. Even under the extreme setting of using only 1 image per class from ImageNet for training, SAT already exceeds the SOTA method by 2.1% GT-known Loc. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wpy1999/SAT.

Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to localize objects using only image-level labels. Recently a new paradigm has emerged by generating a foreground prediction map (FPM) to achieve localization task. Existing FPM-based methods use cross-entropy (CE) to evaluate the foreground prediction map and to guide the learning of generator. We argue for using activation value to achieve more efficient learning. It is based on the experimental observation that, for a trained network, CE converges to zero when the foreground mask covers only part of the object region. While activation value increases until the mask expands to the object boundary, which indicates that more object areas can be learned by using activation value. In this paper, we propose a Background Activation Suppression (BAS) method. Specifically, an Activation Map Constraint module (AMC) is designed to facilitate the learning of generator by suppressing the background activation value. Meanwhile, by using the foreground region guidance and the area constraint, BAS can learn the whole region of the object. In the inference phase, we consider the prediction maps of different categories together to obtain the final localization results. Extensive experiments show that BAS achieves significant and consistent improvement over the baseline methods on the CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC datasets. Code and models are available at github.com/wpy1999IBAS.