This paper presents FastFit, a novel neural vocoder architecture that replaces the U-Net encoder with multiple short-time Fourier transforms (STFTs) to achieve faster generation rates without sacrificing sample quality. We replaced each encoder block with an STFT, with parameters equal to the temporal resolution of each decoder block, leading to the skip connection. FastFit reduces the number of parameters and the generation time of the model by almost half while maintaining high fidelity. Through objective and subjective evaluations, we demonstrated that the proposed model achieves nearly twice the generation speed of baseline iteration-based vocoders while maintaining high sound quality. We further showed that FastFit produces sound qualities similar to those of other baselines in text-to-speech evaluation scenarios, including multi-speaker and zero-shot text-to-speech.

This paper presents a parameter-efficient learning (PEL) to develop a low-resource accent adaptation for text-to-speech (TTS). A resource-efficient adaptation from a frozen pre-trained TTS model is developed by using only 1.2\% to 0.8\% of original trainable parameters to achieve competitive performance in voice synthesis. Motivated by a theoretical foundation of optimal transport (OT), this study carries out PEL for TTS where an auxiliary unsupervised loss based on OT is introduced to maximize a difference between the pre-trained source domain and the (unseen) target domain, in addition to its supervised training loss. Further, we leverage upon this unsupervised loss refinement to boost system performance via either sliced Wasserstein distance or maximum mean discrepancy. The merit of this work is demonstrated by fulfilling PEL solutions based on residual adapter learning, and model reprogramming when evaluating the Mandarin accent adaptation. Experiment results show that the proposed methods can achieve competitive naturalness with parameter-efficient decoder fine-tuning, and the auxiliary unsupervised loss improves model performance empirically.

With the rise of short video platforms as prominent channels for news dissemination, major platforms in China have gradually evolved into fertile grounds for the proliferation of fake news. However, distinguishing short video rumors poses a significant challenge due to the substantial amount of information and shared features among videos, resulting in homogeneity. To address the dissemination of short video rumors effectively, our research group proposes a methodology encompassing multimodal feature fusion and the integration of external knowledge, considering the merits and drawbacks of each algorithm. The proposed detection approach entails the following steps: (1) creation of a comprehensive dataset comprising multiple features extracted from short videos; (2) development of a multimodal rumor detection model: first, we employ the Temporal Segment Networks (TSN) video coding model to extract video features, followed by the utilization of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to extract textual features. Subsequently, the BERT model is employed to fuse textual and video features; (3) distinction is achieved through contrast learning: we acquire external knowledge by crawling relevant sources and leverage a vector database to incorporate this knowledge into the classification output. Our research process is driven by practical considerations, and the knowledge derived from this study will hold significant value in practical scenarios, such as short video rumor identification and the management of social opinions.

In recent years, spammers are now trying to obfuscate their intents by introducing hybrid spam e-mail combining both image and text parts, which is more challenging to detect in comparison to e-mails containing text or image only. The motivation behind this research is to design an effective approach filtering out hybrid spam e-mails to avoid situations where traditional text-based or image-baesd only filters fail to detect hybrid spam e-mails. To the best of our knowledge, a few studies have been conducted with the goal of detecting hybrid spam e-mails. Ordinarily, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is used to eliminate the image parts of spam by transforming images into text. However, the research questions are that although OCR scanning is a very successful technique in processing text-and-image hybrid spam, it is not an effective solution for dealing with huge quantities due to the CPU power required and the execution time it takes to scan e-mail files. And the OCR techniques are not always reliable in the transformation processes. To address such problems, we propose new late multi-modal fusion training frameworks for a text-and-image hybrid spam e-mail filtering system compared to the classical early fusion detection frameworks based on the OCR method. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Continuous Bag of Words were implemented to extract features from image and text parts of hybrid spam respectively, whereas generated features were fed to sigmoid layer and Machine Learning based classifiers including Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT), Naive Bayes (NB) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to determine the e-mail ham or spam.

Conversational text-to-speech (TTS) aims to synthesize speech with proper prosody of reply based on the historical conversation. However, it is still a challenge to comprehensively model the conversation, and a majority of conversational TTS systems only focus on extracting global information and omit local prosody features, which contain important fine-grained information like keywords and emphasis. Moreover, it is insufficient to only consider the textual features, and acoustic features also contain various prosody information. Hence, we propose M2-CTTS, an end-to-end multi-scale multi-modal conversational text-to-speech system, aiming to comprehensively utilize historical conversation and enhance prosodic expression. More specifically, we design a textual context module and an acoustic context module with both coarse-grained and fine-grained modeling. Experimental results demonstrate that our model mixed with fine-grained context information and additionally considering acoustic features achieves better prosody performance and naturalness in CMOS tests.

Information Extraction from visually rich documents is a challenging task that has gained a lot of attention in recent years due to its importance in several document-control based applications and its widespread commercial value. The majority of the research work conducted on this topic to date follow a two-step pipeline. First, they read the text using an off-the-shelf Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine, then, they extract the fields of interest from the obtained text. The main drawback of these approaches is their dependence on an external OCR system, which can negatively impact both performance and computational speed. Recent OCR-free methods were proposed to address the previous issues. Inspired by their promising results, we propose in this paper an OCR-free end-to-end information extraction model named DocParser. It differs from prior end-to-end approaches by its ability to better extract discriminative character features. DocParser achieves state-of-the-art results on various datasets, while still being faster than previous works.

In this work, we present DiffVoice, a novel text-to-speech model based on latent diffusion. We propose to first encode speech signals into a phoneme-rate latent representation with a variational autoencoder enhanced by adversarial training, and then jointly model the duration and the latent representation with a diffusion model. Subjective evaluations on LJSpeech and LibriTTS datasets demonstrate that our method beats the best publicly available systems in naturalness. By adopting recent generative inverse problem solving algorithms for diffusion models, DiffVoice achieves the state-of-the-art performance in text-based speech editing, and zero-shot adaptation.

With this release of Swift, users may now benefit from the latest menu designer functionality, which makes it simple to further refine the menu to improve findability and provide a uniform experience across devices. Simply open your Swift App Designer Studio, click the Edit icon, scroll down, and tap the "click to configure" option. The menu Designer will display after you tap on it, and all you have to do is drag and drop items and change the names of your sub-menus according to your preference. This release of Swift, introduces the OCR functionality. Using the OCR control, end-users can convert the images into text using Optical Character Recognition and save time and increase accuracy in data entry.

In this article, we will dive deep into a new and exciting text-to-speech model developed by Microsoft Research, called VALL-E. The paper presenting the work has been released on Jan. 5, 2023, and since then has been gaining much attention online. It is worth noting that as of writing this article, no pre-trained model has been released and the only option currently to battle-test this model is to train it by yourself. Nevertheless, the idea presented in this paper is novel and interesting and worth digging into, regardless of whether I can immediately clone my voice with it or not. The technology of text-to-speech is not new and has been around since the "Voder" -- the first electronic voice synthesizer from Bell Labs in 1939 which required manual operation.

Hand-printed digits can be modeled as splines that are governed by about 8 control points. Images of digits can be produced by placing Gaussian ink generators uniformly along the spline. Real images can be recognized by finding the digit model most likely to have generated the data. For each digit model we use an elastic matching algorithm to minimize an energy function that includes both the defor(cid:173) mation energy of the digit model and the log probability that the model would generate the inked pixels in the image. If a uniform noise process is included in the model of image generation, some of the inked pixels can be rejected as noise as a digit model is fitting a poorly segmented image.