Real-time speech interaction, serving as a fundamental interface for human-machine collaboration, holds immense potential. However, current open-source models face limitations such as high costs in voice data collection, weakness in dynamic control, and limited intelligence. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Step-Audio, the first production-ready open-source solution. Key contributions include: 1) a 130B-parameter unified speech-text multi-modal model that achieves unified understanding and generation, with the Step-Audio-Chat version open-sourced; 2) a generative speech data engine that establishes an affordable voice cloning framework and produces the open-sourced lightweight Step-Audio-TTS-3B model through distillation; 3) an instruction-driven fine control system enabling dynamic adjustments across dialects, emotions, singing, and RAP; 4) an enhanced cognitive architecture augmented with tool calling and role-playing abilities to manage complex tasks effectively. Based on our new StepEval-Audio-360 evaluation benchmark, Step-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance in human evaluations, especially in terms of instruction following. On open-source benchmarks like LLaMA Question, shows 9.3% average performance improvement, demonstrating our commitment to advancing the development of open-source multi-modal language technologies. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio.

Motif scaffolding seeks to design scaffold structures for constructing proteins with functions derived from the desired motif, which is crucial for the design of vaccines and enzymes. Previous works approach the problem by inpainting or conditional generation. Both of them can only scaffold motifs with fixed positions, and the conditional generation cannot guarantee the presence of motifs. However, prior knowledge of the relative motif positions in a protein is not readily available, and constructing a protein with multiple functions in one protein is more general and significant because of the synergies between functions. We propose a Floating Anchor Diffusion (FADiff) model. FADiff allows motifs to float rigidly and independently in the process of diffusion, which guarantees the presence of motifs and automates the motif position design. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of FADiff with high success rates and designable novel scaffolds. To the best of our knowledge, FADiff is the first work to tackle the challenge of scaffolding multiple motifs without relying on the expertise of relative motif positions in the protein. Code is available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/FADiff.

Innovations like protein diffusion have enabled significant progress in de novo protein design, which is a vital topic in life science. These methods typically depend on protein structure encoders to model residue backbone frames, where atoms do not exist. Most prior encoders rely on atom-wise features, such as angles and distances between atoms, which are not available in this context. Thus far, only several simple encoders, such as IPA, have been proposed for this scenario, exposing the frame modeling as a bottleneck. In this work, we proffer the Vector Field Network (VFN), which enables network layers to perform learnable vector computations between coordinates of frame-anchored virtual atoms, thus achieving a higher capability for modeling frames. The vector computation operates in a manner similar to a linear layer, with each input channel receiving 3D virtual atom coordinates instead of scalar values. The multiple feature vectors output by the vector computation are then used to update the residue representations and virtual atom coordinates via attention aggregation. Remarkably, VFN also excels in modeling both frames and atoms, as the real atoms can be treated as the virtual atoms for modeling, positioning VFN as a potential universal encoder. In protein diffusion (frame modeling), VFN exhibits an impressive performance advantage over IPA, excelling in terms of both designability (67.04% vs. 53.58%) and diversity (66.54% vs. 51.98%). In inverse folding (frame and atom modeling), VFN outperforms the previous SoTA model, PiFold (54.7% vs. 51.66%), on sequence recovery rate. We also propose a method of equipping VFN with the ESM model, which significantly surpasses the previous ESM-based SoTA (62.67% vs. 55.65%), LM-Design, by a substantial margin.

Multivariate long-term time series forecasting is of great application across many domains, such as energy consumption and weather forecasting. With the development of transformer-based methods, the performance of multivariate long-term time series forecasting has been significantly improved, however, the study of spatial features extracting in transformer-based model is rare and the consistency of different prediction periods is unsatisfactory due to the large span. In this work, we propose a complete solution to address these problems in terms of feature extraction and target prediction. For extraction, we design an efficient spatio-temporal encoding extractor including a semi-adaptive graph to acquire sufficient spatio-temporal information. For prediction, we propose a Cascaded Decoding Predictor (CDP) to strengthen the correlation between different intervals, which can also be utilized as a generic component to improve the performance of transformer-based methods. The proposed method, termed as Spatio-temporal Encoding Cascaded Transformer (Stecformer), achieving a notable gap over the baseline model and is comparable with the state-of-the-art performance of transformer-based methods on five benchmark datasets. We hope our attempt will serve as a regular configuration in multivariate long-term time series forecasting in the future.

In recent years, deep learning (DL) models have achieved significant progress in many domains, such as autonomous driving, facial recognition, and speech recognition. However, the vulnerability of deep learning models to adversarial attacks has raised serious concerns in the community because of their insufficient robustness and generalization. Also, transferable attacks have become a prominent method for black-box attacks. In this work, we explore the potential factors that impact adversarial examples (AEs) transferability in DL-based speech recognition. We also discuss the vulnerability of different DL systems and the irregular nature of decision boundaries. Our results show a remarkable difference in the transferability of AEs between speech and images, with the data relevance being low in images but opposite in speech recognition. Motivated by dropout-based ensemble approaches, we propose random gradient ensembles and dynamic gradient-weighted ensembles, and we evaluate the impact of ensembles on the transferability of AEs. The results show that the AEs created by both approaches are valid for transfer to the black box API.

Creating aesthetically pleasing pieces of art, including music, has been a long-term goal for artificial intelligence research. Despite recent successes of long-short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in sequential learning, LSTM neural networks have not, by themselves, been able to generate natural-sounding music conforming to music theory. To transcend this inadequacy, we put forward a novel method for music composition that combines the LSTM with Grammars motivated by music theory. The main tenets of music theory are encoded as grammar argumented (GA) filters on the training data, such that the machine can be trained to generate music inheriting the naturalness of human-composed pieces from the original dataset while adhering to the rules of music theory. Unlike previous approaches, pitches and durations are encoded as one semantic entity, which we refer to as note-level encoding. This allows easy implementation of music theory grammars, as well as closer emulation of the thinking pattern of a musician. Although the GA rules are applied to the training data and never directly to the LSTM music generation, our machine still composes music that possess high incidences of diatonic scale notes, small pitch intervals and chords, in deference to music theory.