PACE: Pretrained Audio Continual Learning

Audio is a fundamental modality for analyzing speech, music, and environmental sounds. Although pretrained audio models have significantly advanced audio understanding, they remain fragile in real-world settings where data distributions shift over time. In this work, we present the first systematic benchmark for audio continual learning (CL) with pretrained models (PTMs), together with a comprehensive analysis of its unique challenges. Unlike in vision, where parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has proven effective for CL, directly transferring such strategies to audio leads to poor performance. This stems from a fundamental property of audio backbones: they focus on low-level spectral details rather than structured semantics, causing severe upstream-downstream misalignment. Through extensive empirical study, we identify analytic classifiers with first-session adaptation (FSA) as a promising direction, but also reveal two major limitations: representation saturation in coarse-grained scenarios and representation drift in fine-grained scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose PACE, a novel method that enhances FSA via a regularized analytic classifier and enables multi-session adaptation through adaptive subspace-orthogonal PEFT for improved semantic alignment. In addition, we introduce spectrogram-based boundary-aware perturbations to mitigate representation overlap and improve stability. Experiments on six diverse audio CL benchmarks demonstrate that PACE substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, marking an important step toward robust and scalable audio continual learning with PTMs.

Rethinking Music Captioning with Music Metadata LLMs

Music captioning, or the task of generating a natural language description of music, is useful for both music understanding and controllable music generation. Training captioning models, however, typically requires high-quality music caption data which is scarce compared to metadata (e.g., genre, mood, etc.). As a result, it is common to use large language models (LLMs) to synthesize captions from metadata to generate training data for captioning models, though this process imposes a fixed stylization and entangles factual information with natural language style. As a more direct approach, we propose metadata-based captioning. We train a metadata prediction model to infer detailed music metadata from audio and then convert it into expressive captions via pre-trained LLMs at inference time. Compared to a strong end-to-end baseline trained on LLM-generated captions derived from metadata, our method: (1) achieves comparable performance in less training time over end-to-end captioners, (2) offers flexibility to easily change stylization post-training, enabling output captions to be tailored to specific stylistic and quality requirements, and (3) can be prompted with audio and partial metadata to enable powerful metadata imputation or in-filling--a common task for organizing music data.

D3PIA: A Discrete Denoising Diffusion Model for Piano Accompaniment Generation From Lead sheet

Generating piano accompaniments in the symbolic music domain is a challenging task that requires producing a complete piece of piano music from given melody and chord constraints, such as those provided by a lead sheet. In this paper, we propose a discrete diffusion-based piano accompaniment generation model, D3PIA, leveraging local alignment between lead sheet and accompaniment in piano-roll representation. D3PIA incorporates Neighborhood Attention (NA) to both encode the lead sheet and condition it for predicting note states in the piano accompaniment. This design enhances local contextual modeling by efficiently attending to nearby melody and chord conditions. We evaluate our model using the POP909 dataset, a widely used benchmark for piano accompaniment generation. Objective evaluation results demonstrate that D3PIA preserves chord conditions more faithfully compared to continuous diffusion-based and Transformer-based baselines. Furthermore, a subjective listening test indicates that D3PIA generates more musically coherent accompaniments than the comparison models.

When Noise Lowers The Loss: Rethinking Likelihood-Based Evaluation in Music Large Language Models

The rise of music large language models (LLMs) demands robust methods of evaluating output quality, especially in distinguishing high-quality compositions from "garbage music". Curiously, we observe that the standard cross-entropy loss -- a core training metric -- often decrease when models encounter systematically corrupted music, undermining its validity as a standalone quality indicator. To investigate this paradox, we introduce noise injection experiment, where controlled noise signal of varying lengths are injected into musical contexts. We hypothesize that a model's loss reacting positively to these perturbations, specifically a sharp increase ("Peak" area) for short injection, can serve as a proxy for its ability to discern musical integrity. Experiments with MusicGen models in the audio waveform domain confirm that Music LLMs respond more strongly to local, texture-level disruptions than to global semantic corruption. Beyond exposing this bias, our results highlight a new principle: the shape of the loss curve -- rather than its absolute value -- encodes critical information about the quality of the generated content (i.e., model behavior). We envision this profile-based evaluation as a label-free, model-intrinsic framework for assessing musical quality -- opening the door to more principled training objectives and sharper benchmarks.

Trailer Reimagined: An Innovative, Llm-DRiven, Expressive Automated Movie Summary framework (TRAILDREAMS)

This paper introduces TRAILDREAMS, a framework that uses a large language model (LLM) to automate the production of movie trailers. The purpose of LLM is to select key visual sequences and impactful dialogues, and to help TRAILDREAMS to generate audio elements such as music and voiceovers. The goal is to produce engaging and visually appealing trailers efficiently. In comparative evaluations, TRAILDREAMS surpasses current state-of-the-art trailer generation methods in viewer ratings. However, it still falls short when compared to real, human-crafted trailers. While TRAILDREAMS demonstrates significant promise and marks an advancement in automated creative processes, further improvements are necessary to bridge the quality gap with traditional trailers.

Uncertainty and Fairness Awareness in LLM-Based Recommendation Systems

Large language models (LLMs) enable powerful zero-shot recommendations by leveraging broad contextual knowledge, yet predictive uncertainty and embedded biases threaten reliability and fairness. This paper studies how uncertainty and fairness evaluations affect the accuracy, consistency, and trustworthiness of LLM-generated recommendations. We introduce a benchmark of curated metrics and a dataset annotated for eight demographic attributes (31 categorical values) across two domains: movies and music. Through in-depth case studies, we quantify predictive uncertainty (via entropy) and demonstrate that Google DeepMind's Gemini 1.5 Flash exhibits systematic unfairness for certain sensitive attributes; measured similarity-based gaps are SNSR at 0.1363 and SNSV at 0.0507. These disparities persist under prompt perturbations such as typographical errors and multilingual inputs. We further integrate personality-aware fairness into the RecLLM evaluation pipeline to reveal personality-linked bias patterns and expose trade-offs between personalization and group fairness. We propose a novel uncertainty-aware evaluation methodology for RecLLMs, present empirical insights from deep uncertainty case studies, and introduce a personality profile-informed fairness benchmark that advances explainability and equity in LLM recommendations. Together, these contributions establish a foundation for safer, more interpretable RecLLMs and motivate future work on multi-model benchmarks and adaptive calibration for trustworthy deployment.

How Far Can Pretrained LLMs Go in Symbolic Music? Controlled Comparisons of Supervised and Preference-based Adaptation

Music often shares notable parallels with language, motivating the use of pretrained large language models (LLMs) for symbolic music understanding and generation. Despite growing interest, the practical effectiveness of adapting instruction-tuned LLMs to symbolic music remains insufficiently characterized. We present a controlled comparative study of finetuning strategies for ABC-based generation and understanding, comparing an off-the-shelf instruction-tuned backbone to domain-adapted variants and a music-specialized LLM baseline. Across multiple symbolic music corpora and evaluation signals, we provide some insights into adaptation choices for symbolic music applications. We highlight the domain adaptation vs.~preserving prior information tradeoff as well as the distinct behaviour of metrics used to measure the domain adaptation for symbolic music.

Music Plagiarism Detection: Problem Formulation and a Segment-based Solution

Recently, the problem of music plagiarism has emerged as an even more pressing social issue. As music information retrieval research advances, there is a growing effort to address issues related to music plagiarism. However, many studies, including our previous work, have conducted research without clearly defining what the music plagiarism detection task actually involves. This lack of a clear definition has slowed research progress and made it hard to apply results to real-world scenarios. To fix this situation, we defined how Music Plagiarism Detection is different from other MIR tasks and explained what problems need to be solved. We introduce the Similar Music Pair dataset to support this newly defined task. In addition, we propose a method based on segment transcription as one way to solve the task. Our demo and dataset are available at https://github.com/Mippia/ICASSP2026-MPD.

Compressed Sensing-Driven Near-Field Localization Exploiting Array of Subarrays

Near-field localization for ISAC requires large-aperture arrays, making fully-digital implementations prohibitively complex and costly. While sparse subarray architectures can reduce cost, they introduce severe estimation ambiguity from grating lobes. To address both issues, we propose SHARE (Sparse Hierarchical Angle-Range Estimation), a novel two-stage sparse recovery algorithm. SHARE operates in two stages. It first performs coarse, unambiguous angle estimation using individual subarrays to resolve the grating lobe ambiguity. It then leverages the full sparse aperture to perform a localized joint angle-range search. This hierarchical approach avoids an exhaustive and computationally intensive two-dimensional grid search while preserving the high resolution of the large aperture. Simulation results show that SHARE significantly outperforms conventional one-shot sparse recovery methods, such as Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP), in both localization accuracy and robustness. Furthermore, we show that SHARE's overall localization accuracy is comparable to or even surpasses that of the fully-digital 2D-MUSIC algorithm, despite MUSIC having access to the complete, uncompressed data from every antenna element. SHARE therefore provides a practical path for high-resolution near-field ISAC systems.

On Every Note a Griff: Looking for a Useful Representation of Basso Continuo Performance Style

Basso continuo is a baroque improvisatory accompaniment style which involves improvising multiple parts above a given bass line in a musical score on a harpsichord or organ. Basso continuo is not merely a matter of history; moreover, it is a historically inspired living practice, and The Aligned Continuo Dataset (ACoRD) records the first sample of modern-day basso continuo playing in the symbolic domain. This dataset, containing 175 MIDI recordings of 5 basso continuo scores performed by 7 players, allows us to start observing and analyzing the variety that basso continuo improvisation brings. A recently proposed basso continuo performance-to-score alignment system provides a way of mapping improvised performance notes to score notes. In order to study aligned basso continuo performances, we need an appropriate feature representation. We propose griff, a representation inspired by historical basso continuo treatises. It enables us to encode both pitch content and structure of a basso continuo realization in a transposition-invariant way. Griffs are directly extracted from aligned basso continuo performances by grouping together performance notes aligned to the same score note in a onset-time ordered way, and they provide meaningful tokens that form a feature space in which we can analyze basso continuo performance styles. We statistically describe griffs extracted from the ACoRD dataset recordings, and show in two experiments how griffs can be used for statistical analysis of individuality of different players' basso continuo performance styles. We finally present an argument why it is desirable to preserve the structure of a basso continuo improvisation in order to conduct a refined analysis of personal performance styles of individual basso continuo practitioners, and why griffs can provide a meaningful historically informed feature space worthy of a more robust empirical validation.