Recent advances in text-to-speech synthesis have achieved notable success in generating high-quality short utterances for individual speakers. However, these systems still face challenges when extending their capabilities to long, multi-speaker, and spontaneous dialogues, typical of real-world scenarios such as podcasts. These limitations arise from two primary challenges: 1) long speech: podcasts typically span several minutes, exceeding the upper limit of most existing work; 2) spontaneity: podcasts are marked by their spontaneous, oral nature, which sharply contrasts with formal, written contexts; existing works often fall short in capturing this spontaneity. In this paper, we propose MoonCast, a solution for high-quality zero-shot podcast generation, aiming to synthesize spontaneous podcast-style speech from text-only sources (e.g., stories, technical reports, news in TXT, PDF, or Web URL formats) using the voices of unseen speakers. To enable long audio generation, we employ a language model with parameter, data, and context scaling to process sequences in an innovative format designed for modeling entire multi-speaker, multi-turn speech interactions. To enhance spontaneity, we observe that ASR transcripts capture spontaneous speech details (e.g., filler words indicating hesitations, and specific punctuation and spaces reflecting breathing pauses), suggesting that these transcripts can serve as a partial indicator of speech spontaneity. Building upon this assumption, we utilize a script generation module to generate scripts incorporating these spontaneous elements. Experiments show MoonCast outperforms baselines, with notable improvements in contextual coherence and spontaneity.

Time series segmentation is a fundamental task in analyzing temporal data across various domains, from human activity recognition to energy monitoring. While numerous state-of-the-art methods have been developed to tackle this problem, the evaluation of their performance remains critically limited. Existing measures predominantly focus on change point accuracy or rely on point-based measures such as Adjusted Rand Index (ARI), which fail to capture the quality of the detected segments, ignore the nature of errors, and offer limited interpretability. In this paper, we address these shortcomings by introducing two novel evaluation measures: WARI (Weighted Adjusted Rand Index), that accounts for the position of segmentation errors, and SMS (State Matching Score), a fine-grained measure that identifies and scores four fundamental types of segmentation errors while allowing error-specific weighting. We empirically validate WARI and SMS on synthetic and real-world benchmarks, showing that they not only provide a more accurate assessment of segmentation quality but also uncover insights, such as error provenance and type, that are inaccessible with traditional measures.

Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is the most widely used method for training machine learning models with provable privacy guarantees. A key challenge in DP-SGD is setting the per-sample gradient clipping threshold, which significantly affects the trade-off between privacy and utility. While recent adaptive methods improve performance by adjusting this threshold during training, they operate in the standard coordinate system and fail to account for correlations across the coordinates of the gradient. We propose GeoClip, a geometry-aware framework that clips and perturbs gradients in a transformed basis aligned with the geometry of the gradient distribution. GeoClip adaptively estimates this transformation using only previously released noisy gradients, incurring no additional privacy cost. We provide convergence guarantees for GeoClip and derive a closed-form solution for the optimal transformation that minimizes the amount of noise added while keeping the probability of gradient clipping under control. Experiments on both tabular and image datasets demonstrate that GeoClip consistently outperforms existing adaptive clipping methods under the same privacy budget.

Human experts employ diverse strategies to complete a task, producing to multimodal demonstration data. Although traditional Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) methods have achieved notable success, they often collapse theses multimodal behaviors into a single strategy, failing to replicate expert behaviors. To overcome this limitation, we propose DPAIL, an adversarial IL framework that leverages diffusion models as a policy class to enhance expressiveness. Building on the Adversarial Soft Advantage Fitting (ASAF) framework, which removes the need for policy optimization steps, DPAIL trains a diffusion policy using a binary cross-entropy objective to distinguish expert trajectories from generated ones. To enable optimization of the diffusion policy, we introduce a novel, tractable lower bound on the policy's likelihood. Through comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations against various baselines, we demonstrate that our method not only captures diverse behaviors but also remains robust as the number of behavior modes increases.

Recent advances in diffusion models have revolutionized text-guided image editing, yet existing editing methods face critical challenges in hyperparameter identification. To get the reasonable editing performance, these methods often require the user to brute-force tune multiple interdependent hyperparameters, such as inversion timesteps and attention modification, etc.

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) aims to identify abnormal frames from discrete events within video sequences. Existing VAD methods suffer from heavy annotation burdens in fully-supervised paradigm, insensitivity to subtle anomalies in semi-supervised paradigm, and vulnerability to noise in weakly-supervised paradigm. To address these limitations, we propose a novel paradigm: SingleFrame supervised VAD (SF-VAD), which uses a single annotated abnormal frame per abnormal video. SF-VAD ensures annotation efficiency while offering precise anomaly reference, facilitating robust anomaly modeling, and enhancing the detection of subtle anomalies in complex visual contexts. To validate its effectiveness, we construct three SF-VAD benchmarks by manually re-annotating the ShanghaiTech, UCF-Crime, and XD-Violence datasets in a practical procedure. Further, we devise Frame-guided Progressive Learning (FPL), to generalize sparse frame supervision to event-level anomaly understanding. FPL first leverages evidential learning to estimate anomaly relevance guided by annotated frames. Then it extends anomaly supervision by mining discrete abnormal events based on anomaly relevance and feature similarity.

Fraudulent activities have caused substantial negative social impacts and are exhibiting emerging characteristics such as intelligence and industrialization, posing challenges of high-order interactions, intricate dependencies, and the sparse yet concealed nature of fraudulent entities. Existing graph fraud detectors are limited by their narrow "receptive fields", as they focus only on the relations between an entity and its neighbors while neglecting longer-range structural associations hidden between entities. To address this issue, we propose a novel fraud detector based on Graph Path Aggregation (GPA). It operates through variable-length path sampling, semantic-associated path encoding, path interaction and aggregation, and aggregation-enhanced fraud detection. To further facilitate interpretable association analysis, we synthesize G-Internet, the first benchmark dataset in the field of internet fraud detection. Extensive experiments across datasets in multiple fraud scenarios demonstrate that the proposed GPA outperforms mainstream fraud detectors by up to +15% in Average Precision (AP). Additionally, GPA exhibits enhanced robustness to noisy labels and provides excellent interpretability by uncovering implicit fraudulent patterns across broader contexts.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated excellent performance in video understanding but suffer from degraded effectiveness when processing long videos due to fixed-length contexts and weaknesses in modeling long-term dependencies. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology can mitigate these limitations through dynamic knowledge expansion, but existing RAG schemes for video understanding employ fixed retrieval paradigms that use uniform structures regardless of input query difficulty. This introduces redundant computational overhead and latency (e.g., complex graph traversal operations) for simple queries (e.g., frame-level object recognition) while potentially causing critical information loss due to insufficient retrieval granularity for multi-hop reasoning. Such single-step retrieval mechanisms severely constrain the model's balance between resource efficiency and cognitive depth. To address this, we first propose a novel AdaVideoRAG framework for long-video understanding, which uses a lightweight intent classifier to dynamically and adaptively allocate appropriate retrieval schemes, ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated, for different video understanding tasks based on query complexity. We introduce an Omni-Knowledge Indexing module to extract valuable information from multi-modal signals for context modeling and build corresponding databases, i.e., a text base from clip captions, ASR, and OCR; a visual base; and a graph for deep semantic understanding. This enables hierarchical knowledge access, integration, and generation from naive retrieval to graph retrieval, achieving an optimal balance between resource consumption and video understanding capabilities. Finally, we construct the HiVU benchmark for deep understanding evaluation. Extensive experiments show that our framework enhances the overall efficiency and accuracy of Video-QA for long videos and can be seamlessly integrated with existing MLLMs via lightweight API calls, establishing a new paradigm for adaptive retrieval augmentation in video analysis.

We introduce a method based on Conformal Prediction (CP) to quantify the uncertainty of full ranking algorithms. We focus on a specific scenario where n+m items are to be ranked by some "black box" algorithm. It is assumed that the relative (ground truth) ranking of n of them is known. The objective is then to quantify the error made by the algorithm on the ranks of the m new items among the total (n+m). In such a setting, the true ranks of the noriginal items in the total (n+m) depend on the (unknown) true ranks of the m new ones. Consequently, we have no direct access to a calibration set to apply a classical CP method.

To fix the'bias in, bias out' problem in fair machine learning, it is important to steer feature distributions of data or internal representations of Large Language Models (LLMs) to ideal ones that guarantee group-fair outcomes. Previous work on fair generative models and representation steering could greatly benefit from provable fairness guarantees on the model output. We define a distribution as ideal if the minimizer of any cost-sensitive risk on it is guaranteed to have exact group-fair outcomes (e.g., demographic parity, equal opportunity)--in other words, it has no fairness-utility trade-off. We formulate an optimization program for optimal steering by finding the nearest ideal distribution in KL-divergence, and provide efficient algorithms for it when the underlying distributions come from well-known parametric families (e.g., normal, log-normal). Empirically, our optimal steering techniques on both synthetic and real-world datasets improve fairness without diminishing utility (and sometimes even improve utility). We demonstrate affine steering of LLM representations to reduce bias in multi-class classification, e.g., occupation prediction from a short biography in Bios dataset (De-Arteaga et al.). Furthermore, we steer internal representations of LLMs towards desired outputs so that it works equally well across different groups.