Discovering Interpretable Acoustic Features in Autoregressive Voice-Cloning TTS Models
Anuj Diwan, David Harwath, Eunsol Choi
AI 速览：该论文提出一个基于特征的框架，用于解释自回归语音克隆TTS模型内部表征的声学属性，并评估稀疏自编码器、PCA和随机方向在探测与操控上的效果。
Voice-cloning TTS models synthesize an unseen speaker's voice from brief speech prompts, but it remains unclear which acoustic properties they represent and use. We introduce a feature-based interpretability framework for autoregressive voice-cloning TTS models, analyzing features from sparse autoencoders (SAEs), PCA, and random directions via sparse probing, steering, and quantitative auto-interpretability. We focus on Qwen3-TTS and extend probing and steering to $5$ additional models to test generalization across architectures. These models encode concepts like pitch, energy, noise, and accent, but sparse prediction and steering are effective only for some concepts. Strong probing does not always translate to steering or vice-versa. SAEs are useful for sparse probing of human-labelled concepts and novel-concept discovery, while PCA is competitive for dense probing and steering. Auto-interpretability finds $684$ automatically validated SAE features in Qwen3-TTS covering speaker clusters, speaking style, and recording conditions beyond known concepts. Overall, we perform a comprehensive interpretability study of autoregressive voice-cloning TTS models.
David Hang, Wenkai Yang, Kuiye Ding, Haiyang Xin, Jacky Wei
Standardized benchmarks are fundamental to reliable progress in AI for EDA, including learning-based thermal modeling. However, existing thermal prediction studies often rely on different datasets, simulators, data splits, preprocessing pipelines, and metrics, while most datasets and implementations remain unavailable, making fair and reproducible comparison difficult. We introduce IC-ThermBench, an open and progressive benchmark that combines established 3D-IC steady-state, transient, and industrial package tasks with a new 50,000-sample 2.5D chiplet extension designed to evaluate progressively broader represented physical variation and cross-package OOD transfer. Five Generalization Scopes cover 3D-IC fixed-design prediction, Within-Family Generalization under layout, material, and boundary-condition variation, and Cross-Package OOD transfer to unseen package systems. We evaluate eight representative baselines under common data, splits, labels, and metrics. Performance degrades gradually from S2 to S4 as represented physical support broadens, but Cross-Package OOD produces a much sharper degradation: the best RMSE and MAE increase from 1.216 and 0.938~K at S4 to 15.99 and 15.00~K at S5, respectively. With only 10 labeled samples per OOD case, target-domain adaptation reduces the best MAE to 2.60~K. IC-ThermBench further provides a unified generation, training, inference, and evaluation pipeline, enabling reproducible and fair comparison of existing and new thermal predictor.
Ozan Sener, Anand Avati, David Hafner, Jierui Lin, Laura Manduchi, Xiaoying Pang, Langwen Huang, Torsten Hoefler 等 10 位作者
Accurate precipitation forecasting remains elusive as physics-based models struggle to resolve mesoscale convection and machine learning often yields physically inconsistent, blurred results that consistently underestimate extreme events. We present FitzRoy, the first system that simultaneously achieves state-of-the-art predictive skill and physical realism over the continental United States. Through a reinforced diffusion framework, where a conditional discrete diffusion model is refined via reinforcement learning, FitzRoy effectively resolves the long-standing trade-off between pointwise accuracy and structural fidelity. Across lead times up to 24 hours, FitzRoy consistently matches or exceeds state-of-the-art models while preserving structural realism and capturing extreme events. Its low-latency inference further enables deployment in real-time operational settings. In case studies such as the 2025 Texas Hill Country floods and the 2026 Missouri floods, FitzRoy signals record-breaking accumulations that existing models largely missed. By bridging the gap between realism and skill, FitzRoy establishes a new frontier for high-fidelity precipitation forecasting.
Lin Zhang, You Zhang, Nicholas Evans, Xin Wang, David Harwath, Abhinav Dhall, Bowen Shi, Chengzhe Sun 等 10 位作者
Recent advances in generative audio models facilitate increasingly flexible and selective editing of linguistic content and paralinguistic, extralinguistic, and other attributes. This paradigm, named partially edited audio, differs from full audio generation as only portions of the real recording are edited. This technique can serve both beneficial and harmful applications. We therefore present a concise survey from both generation and defense perspectives, focusing on audio, as a contribution to the ICASSP 2027 special session entitled "Partially Edited Media: Perspectives from Synthesis and Defense." We first define partially edited audio and argue that what counts as ``fake'' or harmful is an application-dependent judgment, not a fixed property of the edit. We then survey audio editing by editing target, approaches, and evaluation, and then defense methods by detection, localization, diarization, and interpretability, summarizing representative benchmarks and toolkits. Finally, we discuss future directions and open problems.
Ignacio Cuiral-Zueco, David Hardman, Michele Pierallini, Erfan Shahriari
Dexterous manipulation of rigid objects has reached a level of maturity where grasp stability, control, and planning strategies are successfully applied in industry and logistics. In contrast, manipulating deformable objects (cables, plastic pieces, cloth) remains far more challenging, as rigid-object methods do not account for their additional complexity. This paper identifies semantic failure analysis as a key step toward mature deformable-object manipulation and supports this claim with proof-of-concept experiments. Unlike rigid-object manipulation, where goals are well-defined in terms of criteria such as force balance and slippage, deformable-object manipulation involves a broader variety of failure modes arising from differences in materials, geometry, and behaviour. Typical failures include buckling, plastic deformation, pressure variations, and tearing. These diverse and often hard-to-detect events require distinct corrective strategies, making semantic failure analysis necessary. We define its key components and challenges and present experimental results supporting its potential as a research direction.
We present a methodology, an initial AI Skill package, and emerging results, for enhancing software engineers' acquisition and application of domain knowledge and system-wide engineering perspectives towards the development of an autonomous or semi-autonomous system in a domain that may be new to them. At the core of the approach is a process involving proactive adversarial critiquing of videos of disparate systems in related environments. Among other things, the engineers and automated AI tools look for interactions, dependencies, and environment assumptions manifested in the observed systems, which are applicable also to the target system, but that otherwise might remain unarticulated in project artifacts. The approach and its supporting tools can enhance the quality of the target system, the individual engineer's skills and the organization's engineering practices.
Kevin David Hayes, Alex Hanson, Allen Tu, Pranav Asthana, Matthias Zwicker, Tom Goldstein
Driving video captured through a windshield violates the world-space consistency assumed by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS): the road scene exhibits parallax while cabin reflections remain attached to the camera, causing standard 3DGS to embed reflected content into the reconstructed scene. We introduce RIDE-Splat, a pipeline for reflection-free 3D reconstruction from posed driving video without clean images, reflection masks, or pretrained networks. RIDE-Splat assigns world-consistent transmission through the windshield to a 3DGS scene and the dominant camera-attached reflection to one shared, signed RGB image. It builds the clean reconstruction in two passes. First, it learns the 3D geometry and the signed reflection image, representing both added radiance and transmission attenuation. Then, it uses the reflection-removed training images to fit a clean 3DGS model. At inference, the reflection image is discarded, preserving the standard 3DGS rendering path. We also introduce the RIDE-Splat Dataset, the first 3D reconstruction benchmark for reflection removal from driving video -- with real driving scenes, physical windshield reflections in training views, and separately captured non-reflective evaluation images. Across the RIDE-Splat Dataset, XLD, and Wayve, RIDE-Splat outperforms 3DGS, DC-Gaussian, and RobustSplat on all nine aggregate metrics, improving PSNR by up to 3.59 dB and reducing LPIPS by up to 0.0876. We achieve the highest metrics in 38 out of 42 per-scene comparisons and removes windshield reflections that remain visible in the baselines while preserving the transmitted scene.
Yutaro Yamada, Robert Tjarko Lange, Cong Lu, Shengran Hu, Chris Lu, Jakob Foerster, Jeff Clune, David Ha
AI is increasingly playing a pivotal role in transforming how scientific discoveries are made. We introduce The AI Scientist-v2, an end-to-end agentic system capable of producing the first entirely AI generated peer-review-accepted workshop paper. This system iteratively formulates scientific hypotheses, designs and executes experiments, analyzes and visualizes data, and autonomously authors scientific manuscripts. Compared to its predecessor (v1, Lu et al., 2024 arXiv:2408.06292), The AI Scientist-v2 eliminates the reliance on human-authored code templates, generalizes effectively across diverse machine learning domains, and leverages a novel progressive agentic tree-search methodology managed by a dedicated experiment manager agent. Additionally, we enhance the AI reviewer component by integrating a Vision-Language Model (VLM) feedback loop for iterative refinement of content and aesthetics of the figures. We evaluated The AI Scientist-v2 by submitting three fully autonomous manuscripts to a peer-reviewed ICLR workshop. Notably, one manuscript achieved high enough scores to exceed the average human acceptance threshold, marking the first instance of a fully AI-generated paper successfully navigating a peer review. This accomplishment highlights the growing capability of AI in conducting all aspects of scientific research. We anticipate that further advancements in autonomous scientific discovery technologies will profoundly impact human knowledge generation, enabling unprecedented scalability in research productivity and significantly accelerating scientific breakthroughs, greatly benefiting society at large. We have open-sourced the code at https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist-v2 to foster the future development of this transformative technology. We also discuss the role of AI in science, including AI safety.