Sample overlap is a common issue in evidence synthesis in the field of medical research, particularly when integrating findings from observational studies utilizing existing databases such as registries. Due to the general inaccessibility of unique identifiers for each observation, addressing sample overlap has been a complex problem, potentially biasing evidence synthesis outcomes and undermining their credibility. We developed a method to construct indicators for the degree of sample overlap in evidence synthesis of studies based on existing data. Our method is rooted in set theory and is based on the coding of the ranges of several well selected sample characteristics, offers a practical solution by focusing on making inference based on sample characteristics rather than on individual participant data. Useful information, such as the overlap-free sample set with the largest sample size in an evidence synthesis, can be derived from this method. We applied our model to several real-world evidence syntheses, demonstrating its effectiveness and flexibility. Our findings highlight the growing importance of addressing sample overlap in evidence synthesis, especially with the increasin
Evidence synthesis has advanced through improved reporting standards, bias assessment tools, and analytic methods, but current workflows remain limited by a single-layer structure in which conceptual, methodological, and procedural decisions are made on the same level. This forces each project to rebuild its methodological foundations from scratch, leading to inconsistencies, conceptual drift, and unstable reasoning across projects. RECAP Framework v1.0 introduces a three-layer meta-architecture consisting of methodological laws (Grandparent), domain-level abstractions (Parent), and project-level implementations (Child). The framework defines an inheritance system with strict rules for tiering, routing, and contamination control to preserve construct clarity, enforce inferential discipline, and support reproducibility across multi-project evidence ecosystems. RECAP provides a formal governance layer for evidence synthesis and establishes the foundation for a methodological lineage designed to stabilize reasoning across research programs.
Advances in generative artificial intelligence have altered multimedia creation, allowing for automatic cinematic video synthesis from text inputs. This work describes a method for creating 60-second cinematic movies incorporating Stable Diffusion for high-fidelity image synthesis, GPT-2 for narrative structuring, and a hybrid audio pipeline using gTTS and YouTube-sourced music. It uses a five-scene framework, which is augmented by linear frame interpolation, cinematic post-processing (e.g., sharpening), and audio-video synchronization to provide professional-quality results. It was created in a GPU-accelerated Google Colab environment using Python 3.11. It has a dual-mode Gradio interface (Simple and Advanced), which supports resolutions of up to 1024x768 and frame rates of 15-30 FPS. Optimizations such as CUDA memory management and error handling ensure reliability. The experiments demonstrate outstanding visual quality, narrative coherence, and efficiency, furthering text-to-video synthesis for creative, educational, and industrial applications.
With read-aloud speech synthesis achieving high naturalness scores, there is a growing research interest in synthesising spontaneous speech. However, human spontaneous face-to-face conversation has both spoken and non-verbal aspects (here, co-speech gestures). Only recently has research begun to explore the benefits of jointly synthesising these two modalities in a single system. The previous state of the art used non-probabilistic methods, which fail to capture the variability of human speech and motion, and risk producing oversmoothing artefacts and sub-optimal synthesis quality. We present the first diffusion-based probabilistic model, called Diff-TTSG, that jointly learns to synthesise speech and gestures together. Our method can be trained on small datasets from scratch. Furthermore, we describe a set of careful uni- and multi-modal subjective tests for evaluating integrated speech and gesture synthesis systems, and use them to validate our proposed approach. Please see https://shivammehta25.github.io/Diff-TTSG/ for video examples, data, and code.
Comprehending natural language instructions is a charming property for both 2D and 3D layout synthesis systems. Existing methods implicitly model object joint distributions and express object relations, hindering generation's controllability. We introduce InstructLayout, a novel generative framework that integrates a semantic graph prior and a layout decoder to improve controllability and fidelity for 2D and 3D layout synthesis. The proposed semantic graph prior learns layout appearances and object distributions simultaneously, demonstrating versatility across various downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. To facilitate the benchmarking for text-driven 2D and 3D scene synthesis, we respectively curate two high-quality datasets of layout-instruction pairs from public Internet resources with large language and multimodal models. Extensive experimental results reveal that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin in both 2D and 3D layout synthesis tasks. Thorough ablation studies confirm the efficacy of crucial design components.
While existing anomaly synthesis methods have made remarkable progress, achieving both realism and diversity in synthesis remains a major obstacle. To address this, we propose AnomalyPainter, a zero-shot framework that breaks the diversity-realism trade-off dilemma through synergizing Vision Language Large Model (VLLM), Latent Diffusion Model (LDM), and our newly introduced texture library Tex-9K. Tex-9K is a professional texture library containing 75 categories and 8,792 texture assets crafted for diverse anomaly synthesis. Leveraging VLLM's general knowledge, reasonable anomaly text descriptions are generated for each industrial object and matched with relevant diverse textures from Tex-9K. These textures then guide the LDM via ControlNet to paint on normal images. Furthermore, we introduce Texture-Aware Latent Init to stabilize the natural-image-trained ControlNet for industrial images. Extensive experiments show that AnomalyPainter outperforms existing methods in realism, diversity, and generalization, achieving superior downstream performance.
Stellar population synthesis is a crucial methodology in astrophysics, enabling the interpretation of the integrated light of galaxies and stellar clusters. By combining empirical and/or theoretical libraries of the spectral energy distribution emitted by simple stellar populations (SSPs) with models of the star formation history (SFH) and chemical evolution, population synthesis facilitates the estimation of essential galaxy properties, such as total stellar mass, star formation rate, mass-weighted age and metallicity, etc. The Population Synthesis Toolkit (PST) is a Python library that offers a comprehensive and flexible framework for stellar population synthesis. Its main goal is to compute composite spectra using different galaxy evolution models and SSP libraries with ease and efficiency. It incorporates additional effects, such as cosmic redshift and dust extinction, and it computes several observable quantities derived from the spectra, including broadband photometric fluxes and equivalent widths.
It is now widely accepted that the standard inferential toolkit used by the scientific research community -- null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST) -- is not fit for purpose. Yet despite the threat posed to the scientific enterprise, there is no agreement concerning alternative approaches for evidence assessment. This lack of consensus reflects long-standing issues concerning Bayesian methods, the principal alternative to NHST. We report on recent work that builds on an approach to inference put forward over 70 years ago to address the well-known "Problem of Priors" in Bayesian analysis, by reversing the conventional prior-likelihood-posterior ("forward") use of Bayes's Theorem. Such Reverse-Bayes analysis allows priors to be deduced from the likelihood by requiring that the posterior achieve a specified level of credibility. We summarise the technical underpinning of this approach, and show how it opens up new approaches to common inferential challenges, such as assessing the credibility of scientific findings, setting them in appropriate context, estimating the probability of successful replications, and extracting more insight from NHST while reducing the risk of misinterpr
Spin-1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chains are excellent one-dimensional platforms for exploring quantum magnetic states and quasiparticle fractionalization. Understanding its quantum magnetism and quasiparticle excitation at the atomic scale is crucial for manipulating the quantum spin systems. Here, we report the fabrication of spin-1/2 Heisenberg chains through on-surface synthesis and in-situ reduction. A closed-shell nanographene is employed as a precursor for Ullman coupling to avoid radical fusing, thus obtaining oligomer chains. Following exposure to atomic hydrogen and tip manipulation, closed-shell polymers are transformed into spin-1/2 chains with controlled lengths by reducing the ketone groups and subsequent hydrogen desorption. The spin excitation gaps are found to decrease in power-law as the chain lengths, suggesting its gapless feature. More interestingly, the spinon dispersion is extracted from the inelastic spectroscopic spectra, agreeing well with the calculations. Our results demonstrate the great potential of fabricating desired quantum systems through a combined on-surface synthesis and reduction approach.
Face sketch synthesis is a technique aimed at converting face photos into sketches. Existing face sketch synthesis research mainly relies on training with numerous photo-sketch sample pairs from existing datasets. However, these large-scale discriminative learning methods will have to face problems such as data scarcity and high human labor costs. Once the training data becomes scarce, their generative performance significantly degrades. In this paper, we propose a one-shot face sketch synthesis method based on diffusion models. We optimize text instructions on a diffusion model using face photo-sketch image pairs. Then, the instructions derived through gradient-based optimization are used for inference. To simulate real-world scenarios more accurately and evaluate method effectiveness more comprehensively, we introduce a new benchmark named One-shot Face Sketch Dataset (OS-Sketch). The benchmark consists of 400 pairs of face photo-sketch images, including sketches with different styles and photos with different backgrounds, ages, sexes, expressions, illumination, etc. For a solid out-of-distribution evaluation, we select only one pair of images for training at each time, with the
This paper introduces EmoSSLSphere, a novel framework for multilingual emotional text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis that combines spherical emotion vectors with discrete token features derived from self-supervised learning (SSL). By encoding emotions in a continuous spherical coordinate space and leveraging SSL-based representations for semantic and acoustic modeling, EmoSSLSphere enables fine-grained emotional control, effective cross-lingual emotion transfer, and robust preservation of speaker identity. We evaluate EmoSSLSphere on English and Japanese corpora, demonstrating significant improvements in speech intelligibility, spectral fidelity, prosodic consistency, and overall synthesis quality. Subjective evaluations further confirm that our method outperforms baseline models in terms of naturalness and emotional expressiveness, underscoring its potential as a scalable solution for multilingual emotional TTS.
In this paper we propose dynamic output-feedback controller synthesis methods for discrete-time linear time-invariant systems. The synthesis goal is to achieve dissipativity with respect to a given quadratic supply rate or a given $H_2$ performance level. It is assumed that the model of system dynamics is unknown, expect for the disturbance term. Instead, we have a recorded trajectory of the control input and the state, which can be corrupted by an unknown but bounded disturbance. The state data is used only for the purpose of controller synthesis, while the designed controller is output feedback controller, i.e., the full state is not used for control in real time. The presented synthesis method is formulated in terms of linear matrix inequalities parametrized by a scalar variable. Within the considered setting, the synthesis procedure is non-conservative.
This paper presents MCP4EDA, the first Model Context Protocol server that enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to control and optimize the complete open-source RTL-to-GDSII design flow through natural language interaction. The system integrates Yosys synthesis, Icarus Verilog simulation, OpenLane place-and-route, GTKWave analysis, and KLayout visualization into a unified LLM-accessible interface, enabling designers to execute complex multi-tool EDA workflows conversationally via AI assistants such as Claude Desktop and Cursor IDE. The principal contribution is a backend-aware synthesis optimization methodology wherein LLMs analyze actual post-layout timing, power, and area metrics from OpenLane results to iteratively refine synthesis TCL scripts, establishing a closed-loop optimization system that bridges the traditional gap between synthesis estimates and physical implementation reality. In contrast to conventional flows that rely on wire-load models, this methodology leverages real backend performance data to guide synthesis parameter tuning, optimization sequence selection, and constraint refinement, with the LLM functioning as an intelligent design space exploration agent. Expe
Achieving precise and controllable emotional expression is crucial for producing natural and context-appropriate speech in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. However, many emotion-aware TTS systems, including large language model (LLM)-based designs, rely on scaling fixed emotion embeddings or external guidance, limiting their ability to model emotion-specific latent characteristics. To address this gap, we present EmoShift, a lightweight activation-steering framework incorporating a EmoSteer layer, which learns a steering vector for each target emotion in the output embedding space to capture its latent offset and maintain stable, appropriate expression across utterances and categories. With only 10M trainable parameters,less than 1/30 of full fine-tuning, EmoShift outperforms zero-shot and fully fine-tuned baselines in objective and subjective evaluations, enhancing emotional expressiveness while preserving naturalness and speaker similarity. Further analysis confirms the proposed EmoSteer layer's effectiveness and reveals its potential for controllable emotional intensity in speech synthesis.
Correctness and robustness are essential for logic synthesis applications, but they are often only tested with a limited set of benchmarks. Moreover, when the application fails on a large benchmark, the debugging process may be tedious and time-consuming. In some fields such as compiler construction, automatic testing and debugging tools are well-developed to support developers and provide minimal guarantees on program quality. In this paper, we adapt fuzz testing and delta debugging techniques and specialize them for gate-level netlists commonly used in logic synthesis. Our toolkit improves over similar tools specialized for the AIGER format by supporting other gate-level netlist formats and by allowing a tight integration to provide 10x speed-up. Experimental results show that our fuzzer captures defects in mockturtle, ABC, and LSOracle with 10x smaller testcases and our testcase minimizer extracts minimal failure-inducing cores using 2x fewer oracle calls.
Models accounting for imperfect detection are important. Single-visit methods have been proposed as an alternative to multiple-visits methods to relax the assumption of closed population. Knape and Korner-Nievergelt (2015) showed that under certain models of probability of detection single-visit methods are statistically non-identifiable leading to biased population estimates. There is a close relationship between estimation of the resource selection probability function (RSPF) using weighted distributions and single-visit methods for occupancy and abundance estimation. We explain the precise mathematical conditions needed for RSPF estimation as stated in Lele and Keim (2006). The identical conditions, that remained unstated in our papers on single-visit methodology, are needed for single-visit methodology to work. We show that the class of admissible models is quite broad and does not excessively restrict the application of the RSPF or the single-visit methodology. To complement the work by Knape and Korner-Nievergelt, we study the performance of multiple-visit methods under the scaled logistic detection function and a much wider set of situations. In general, under the scaled log
Shared challenges provide a venue for comparing systems trained on common data using a standardized evaluation, and they also provide an invaluable resource for researchers when the data and evaluation results are publicly released. The Blizzard Challenge and Voice Conversion Challenge are two such challenges for text-to-speech synthesis and for speaker conversion, respectively, and their publicly-available system samples and listening test results comprise a historical record of state-of-the-art synthesis methods over the years. In this paper, we revisit these past challenges and conduct a large-scale listening test with samples from many challenges combined. Our aims are to analyze and compare opinions of a large number of systems together, to determine whether and how opinions change over time, and to collect a large-scale dataset of a diverse variety of synthetic samples and their ratings for further research. We found strong correlations challenge by challenge at the system level between the original results and our new listening test. We also observed the importance of the choice of speaker on synthesis quality.
Cycloids are particular Petri nets for modelling processes of actions and events, belonging to the fundaments of Petri's general systems theory. Defined by four parameters they provide an algebraic formalism to describe strongly synchronized sequential processes. To further investigate their structure, reduction systems of cycloids are defined in the style of rewriting systems and properties of irreducible cycloids are proved. In particular the synthesis of cycloid parameters from their Petri net structure is derived, leading to an efficient method for a decision procedure for cycloid isomorphism.
This paper presents a novel free-hand sketch synthesis approach addressing explicit abstraction control in class-conditional and photo-to-sketch synthesis. Abstraction is a vital aspect of sketches, as it defines the fundamental distinction between a sketch and an image. Previous works relied on implicit control to achieve different levels of abstraction, leading to inaccurate control and synthesized sketches deviating from human sketches. To resolve this challenge, we propose two novel abstraction control mechanisms, state embeddings and the stroke token, integrated into a transformer-based latent diffusion model (LDM). These mechanisms explicitly provide the required amount of points or strokes to the model, enabling accurate point-level and stroke-level control in synthesized sketches while preserving recognizability. Outperforming state-of-the-art approaches, our method effectively generates diverse, non-rigid and human-like sketches. The proposed approach enables coherent sketch synthesis and excels in representing human habits with desired abstraction levels, highlighting the potential of sketch synthesis for real-world applications.
Articulatory information has been shown to be effective in improving the performance of HMM-based and DNN-based text-to-speech synthesis. Speech synthesis research focuses traditionally on text-to-speech conversion, when the input is text or an estimated linguistic representation, and the target is synthesized speech. However, a research field that has risen in the last decade is articulation-to-speech synthesis (with a target application of a Silent Speech Interface, SSI), when the goal is to synthesize speech from some representation of the movement of the articulatory organs. In this paper, we extend traditional (vocoder-based) DNN-TTS with articulatory input, estimated from ultrasound tongue images. We compare text-only, ultrasound-only, and combined inputs. Using data from eight speakers, we show that that the combined text and articulatory input can have advantages in limited-data scenarios, namely, it may increase the naturalness of synthesized speech compared to single text input. Besides, we analyze the ultrasound tongue recordings of several speakers, and show that misalignments in the ultrasound transducer positioning can have a negative effect on the final synthesis per