MAP-Neo: Highly Capable and Transparent Bilingual Large Language Model Series

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made great strides in recent years to achieve unprecedented performance across different tasks. However, due to commercial interest, the most competitive models like GPT, Gemini, and Claude have been gated behind proprietary interfaces without disclosing the training details. Recently, many institutions have open-sourced several strong LLMs like LLaMA-3, comparable to existing closed-source LLMs. However, only the model's weights are provided with most details (e.g., intermediate checkpoints, pre-training corpus, and training code, etc.) being undisclosed. To improve the transparency of LLMs, the research community has formed to open-source truly open LLMs (e.g., Pythia, Amber, OLMo), where more details (e.g., pre-training corpus and training code) are being provided. These models have greatly advanced the scientific study of these large models including their strengths, weaknesses, biases and risks. However, we observe that the existing truly open LLMs on reasoning, knowledge, and coding tasks are still inferior to existing state-of-the-art LLMs with similar model sizes. To this end, we open-source MAP-Neo, a highly capable and transparent bilingual language model with 7B parameters trained from scratch on 4.5T high-quality tokens. Our MAP-Neo is the first fully open-sourced bilingual LLM with comparable performance compared to existing state-of-the-art LLMs. Moreover, we open-source all details to reproduce our MAP-Neo, where the cleaned pre-training corpus, data cleaning pipeline, checkpoints, and well-optimized training/evaluation framework are provided. Finally, we hope our MAP-Neo will enhance and strengthen the open research community and inspire more innovations and creativities to facilitate the further improvements of LLMs.

Explaining models relating objects and privacy

Accurately predicting whether an image is private before sharing it online is difficult due to the vast variety of content and the subjective nature of privacy itself. In this paper, we evaluate privacy models that use objects extracted from an image to determine why the image is predicted as private. To explain the decision of these models, we use feature-attribution to identify and quantify which objects (and which of their features) are more relevant to privacy classification with respect to a reference input (i.e., no objects localised in an image) predicted as public. We show that the presence of the person category and its cardinality is the main factor for the privacy decision. Therefore, these models mostly fail to identify private images depicting documents with sensitive data, vehicle ownership, and internet activity, or public images with people (e.g., an outdoor concert or people walking in a public space next to a famous landmark). As baselines for future benchmarks, we also devise two strategies that are based on the person presence and cardinality and achieve comparable classification performance of the privacy models.

ComposerX: Multi-Agent Symbolic Music Composition with LLMs

Music composition represents the creative side of humanity, and itself is a complex task that requires abilities to understand and generate information with long dependency and harmony constraints. While demonstrating impressive capabilities in STEM subjects, current LLMs easily fail in this task, generating ill-written music even when equipped with modern techniques like In-Context-Learning and Chain-of-Thoughts. To further explore and enhance LLMs' potential in music composition by leveraging their reasoning ability and the large knowledge base in music history and theory, we propose ComposerX, an agent-based symbolic music generation framework. We find that applying a multi-agent approach significantly improves the music composition quality of GPT-4. The results demonstrate that ComposerX is capable of producing coherent polyphonic music compositions with captivating melodies, while adhering to user instructions.

MuPT: A Generative Symbolic Music Pretrained Transformer

In this paper, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the pre-training of music. While the prevalent use of MIDI in music modeling is well-established, our findings suggest that LLMs are inherently more compatible with ABC Notation, which aligns more closely with their design and strengths, thereby enhancing the model's performance in musical composition. To address the challenges associated with misaligned measures from different tracks during generation, we propose the development of a Synchronized Multi-Track ABC Notation (SMT-ABC Notation), which aims to preserve coherence across multiple musical tracks. Our contributions include a series of models capable of handling up to 8192 tokens, covering 90% of the symbolic music data in our training set. Furthermore, we explore the implications of the Symbolic Music Scaling Law (SMS Law) on model performance. The results indicate a promising direction for future research in music generation, offering extensive resources for community-led research through our open-source contributions.

Mind the Domain Gap: a Systematic Analysis on Bioacoustic Sound Event Detection

Detecting the presence of animal vocalisations in nature is essential to study animal populations and their behaviors. A recent development in the field is the introduction of the task known as few-shot bioacoustic sound event detection, which aims to train a versatile animal sound detector using only a small set of audio samples. Previous efforts in this area have utilized different architectures and data augmentation techniques to enhance model performance. However, these approaches have not fully bridged the domain gap between source and target distributions, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce an new dataset designed to augment the diversity and breadth of classes available for few-shot bioacoustic event detection, building on the foundations of our previous datasets. To establish a robust baseline system tailored for the DCASE 2024 Task 5 challenge, we delve into an array of acoustic features and adopt negative hard sampling as our primary domain adaptation strategy. This approach, chosen in alignment with the challenge's guidelines that necessitate the independent treatment of each audio file, sidesteps the use of transductive learning to ensure compliance while aiming to enhance the system's adaptability to domain shifts. Our experiments show that the proposed baseline system achieves a better performance compared with the vanilla prototypical network. The findings also confirm the effectiveness of each domain adaptation method by ablating different components within the networks. This highlights the potential to improve few-shot bioacoustic sound event detection by further reducing the impact of domain shift.

Generalized Multi-Source Inference for Text Conditioned Music Diffusion Models

Multi-Source Diffusion Models (MSDM) allow for compositional musical generation tasks: generating a set of coherent sources, creating accompaniments, and performing source separation. Despite their versatility, they require estimating the joint distribution over the sources, necessitating pre-separated musical data, which is rarely available, and fixing the number and type of sources at training time. This paper generalizes MSDM to arbitrary time-domain diffusion models conditioned on text embeddings. These models do not require separated data as they are trained on mixtures, can parameterize an arbitrary number of sources, and allow for rich semantic control. We propose an inference procedure enabling the coherent generation of sources and accompaniments. Additionally, we adapt the Dirac separator of MSDM to perform source separation. We experiment with diffusion models trained on Slakh2100 and MTG-Jamendo, showcasing competitive generation and separation results in a relaxed data setting.

WavCraft: Audio Editing and Generation with Natural Language Prompts

We introduce WavCraft, a collective system that leverages large language models (LLMs) to connect diverse task-specific models for audio content creation and editing. Specifically, WavCraft describes the content of raw sound materials in natural language and prompts the LLM conditioned on audio descriptions and users' requests. WavCraft leverages the in-context learning ability of the LLM to decomposes users' instructions into several tasks and tackle each task collaboratively with audio expert modules. Through task decomposition along with a set of task-specific models, WavCraft follows the input instruction to create or edit audio content with more details and rationales, facilitating users' control. In addition, WavCraft is able to cooperate with users via dialogue interaction and even produce the audio content without explicit user commands. Experiments demonstrate that WavCraft yields a better performance than existing methods, especially when adjusting the local regions of audio clips. Moreover, WavCraft can follow complex instructions to edit and even create audio content on the top of input recordings, facilitating audio producers in a broader range of applications. Our implementation and demos are available at https://github.com/JinhuaLiang/WavCraft.

ChatMusician: Understanding and Generating Music Intrinsically with LLM

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in text generation, we find that their ability has yet to be generalized to music, humanity's creative language. We introduce ChatMusician, an open-source LLM that integrates intrinsic musical abilities. It is based on continual pre-training and finetuning LLaMA2 on a text-compatible music representation, ABC notation, and the music is treated as a second language. ChatMusician can understand and generate music with a pure text tokenizer without any external multi-modal neural structures or tokenizers. Interestingly, endowing musical abilities does not harm language abilities, even achieving a slightly higher MMLU score. Our model is capable of composing well-structured, full-length music, conditioned on texts, chords, melodies, motifs, musical forms, etc, surpassing GPT-4 baseline. On our meticulously curated college-level music understanding benchmark, MusicTheoryBench, ChatMusician surpasses LLaMA2 and GPT-3.5 on zero-shot setting by a noticeable margin. Our work reveals that LLMs can be an excellent compressor for music, but there remains significant territory to be conquered. We release our 4B token music-language corpora MusicPile, the collected MusicTheoryBench, code, model and demo in GitHub.

A Data-Driven Analysis of Robust Automatic Piano Transcription

Algorithms for automatic piano transcription have improved dramatically in recent years due to new datasets and modeling techniques. Recent developments have focused primarily on adapting new neural network architectures, such as the Transformer and Perceiver, in order to yield more accurate systems. In this work, we study transcription systems from the perspective of their training data. By measuring their performance on out-of-distribution annotated piano data, we show how these models can severely overfit to acoustic properties of the training data. We create a new set of audio for the MAESTRO dataset, captured automatically in a professional studio recording environment via Yamaha Disklavier playback. Using various data augmentation techniques when training with the original and re-performed versions of the MAESTRO dataset, we achieve state-of-the-art note-onset accuracy of 88.4 F1-score on the MAPS dataset, without seeing any of its training data. We subsequently analyze these data augmentation techniques in a series of ablation studies to better understand their influence on the resulting models.

Acoustic Prompt Tuning: Empowering Large Language Models with Audition Capabilities

The auditory system plays a substantial role in shaping the overall human perceptual experience. While prevailing large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs) have shown their promise in solving a wide variety of vision and language understanding tasks, only a few of them can be generalised to the audio domain without compromising their domain-specific capacity. In this work, we introduce Acoustic Prompt Turning (APT), a new adapter extending LLMs and VLMs to the audio domain by soft prompting only. Specifically, APT applies an instruction-aware audio aligner to generate soft prompts, conditioned on both input text and sounds, as language model inputs. To mitigate the data scarcity in the audio domain, a multi-task learning strategy is proposed by formulating diverse audio tasks in a sequence-to-sequence manner. Moreover, we improve the framework of audio language model by using interleaved audio-text embeddings as the input sequence. This improved framework imposes zero constraints on the input format and thus is capable of tackling more understanding tasks, such as few-shot audio classification and audio reasoning. To further evaluate the reasoning ability of audio networks, we propose natural language audio reasoning (NLAR), a new task that analyses across two audio clips by comparison and summarization. Experiments show that APT-enhanced LLMs (namely APT-LLMs) achieve competitive results compared to the expert models (i.e., the networks trained on the targeted datasets) across various tasks. We finally demonstrate the APT's ability in extending frozen VLMs to the audio domain without finetuning, achieving promising results in the audio-visual question and answering task. Our code and model weights are released at https://github.com/JinhuaLiang/APT.