AudioRAG: A Challenging Benchmark for Audio Reasoning and Information Retrieval

Due to recent advancements in Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) that demonstrate remarkable performance across a range of sound-, speech- and music-related tasks, there is a growing interest in proposing benchmarks to assess these models. Existing benchmarks generally focus only on reasoning with internal knowledge, neglecting real-world scenarios that require external information grounding. To bridge this gap, we introduce AudioRAG, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate audio-based reasoning augmented by information retrieval in realistic web environments. This benchmark comprises both LLM-generated and manually curated question-answer pairs. Our evaluations reveal that even the state-of-the-art LALMs struggle to answer these questions. We therefore propose an agentic pipeline that integrates audio reasoning with retrieval-augmented generation, providing a stronger baseline for future research.

The ICASSP 2026 Automatic Song Aesthetics Evaluation Challenge

This paper summarizes the ICASSP 2026 Automatic Song Aesthetics Evaluation (ASAE) Challenge, which focuses on predicting the subjective aesthetic scores of AI-generated songs. The challenge consists of two tracks: Track 1 targets the prediction of the overall musicality score, while Track 2 focuses on predicting five fine-grained aesthetic scores. The challenge attracted strong interest from the research community and received numerous submissions from both academia and industry. Top-performing systems significantly surpassed the official baseline, demonstrating substantial progress in aligning objective metrics with human aesthetic preferences. The outcomes establish a standardized benchmark and advance human-aligned evaluation methodologies for modern music generation systems.

MOSS-Audio-Tokenizer: Scaling Audio Tokenizers for Future Audio Foundation Models

Discrete audio tokenizers are fundamental to empowering large language models with native audio processing and generation capabilities. Despite recent progress, existing approaches often rely on pretrained encoders, semantic distillation, or heterogeneous CNN-based architectures. These designs introduce fixed inductive biases that limit reconstruction fidelity and hinder effective scaling. In this paper, we argue that discrete audio tokenization should be learned fully end-to-end using a homogeneous and scalable architecture. To this end, we first propose CAT (Causal Audio Tokenizer with Transformer), a purely Transformer-based architecture that jointly optimizes the encoder, quantizer, and decoder from scratch for high-fidelity reconstruction. Building on the CAT architecture, we develop MOSS-Audio-Tokenizer, a large-scale audio tokenizer featuring 1.6 billion parameters, pre-trained on 3 million hours of diverse, general audio data. We show that this simple, fully end-to-end approach built from homogeneous, causal Transformer blocks scales gracefully and supports high-fidelity reconstruction across diverse audio domains. Across speech, sound, and music, MOSS-Audio-Tokenizer consistently outperforms prior codecs over a wide range of bitrates, while exhibiting predictable improvements with increased scale. Notably, leveraging the discrete tokens from our model, we develop the first purely autoregressive TTS model that surpasses prior non-autoregressive and cascaded systems. Furthermore, MOSS-Audio-Tokenizer enables competitive ASR performance without auxiliary encoders. Our findings position the CAT architecture as a unified, scalable interface for the next generation of native audio foundation 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.

Inverting Self-Organizing Maps: A Unified Activation-Based Framework

Self-Organizing Maps provide topology-preserving projections of high-dimensional data and have been widely used for visualization, clustering, and vector quantization. In this work, we show that the activation pattern of a SOM - the squared distances to its prototypes - can be inverted to recover the exact input under mild geometric conditions. This follows from a classical fact in Euclidean distance geometry: a point in $D$ dimensions is uniquely determined by its distances to $D{+}1$ affinely independent references. We derive the corresponding linear system and characterize the conditions under which the inversion is well-posed. Building upon this mechanism, we introduce the Manifold-Aware Unified SOM Inversion and Control (MUSIC) update rule, which enables controlled, semantically meaningful trajectories in latent space. MUSIC modifies squared distances to selected prototypes while preserving others, resulting in a deterministic geometric flow aligned with the SOM's piecewise-linear structure. Tikhonov regularization stabilizes the update rule and ensures smooth motion on high-dimensional datasets. Unlike variational or probabilistic generative models, MUSIC does not rely on sampling, latent priors, or encoder-decoder architectures. If no perturbation is applied, inversion recovers the exact input; when a target cluster or prototype is specified, MUSIC produces coherent semantic variations while remaining on the data manifold. This leads to a new perspective on data augmentation and controllable latent exploration based solely on prototype geometry. We validate the approach using synthetic Gaussian mixtures, the MNIST and the Faces in the Wild dataset. Across all settings, MUSIC produces smooth, interpretable trajectories that reveal the underlying geometry of the learned manifold, illustrating the advantages of SOM-based inversion over unsupervised clustering.

NarraScore: Bridging Visual Narrative and Musical Dynamics via Hierarchical Affective Control

Synthesizing coherent soundtracks for long-form videos remains a formidable challenge, currently stalled by three critical impediments: computational scalability, temporal coherence, and, most critically, a pervasive semantic blindness to evolving narrative logic. To bridge these gaps, we propose NarraScore, a hierarchical framework predicated on the core insight that emotion serves as a high-density compression of narrative logic. Uniquely, we repurpose frozen Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as continuous affective sensors, distilling high-dimensional visual streams into dense, narrative-aware Valence-Arousal trajectories. Mechanistically, NarraScore employs a Dual-Branch Injection strategy to reconcile global structure with local dynamism: a \textit{Global Semantic Anchor} ensures stylistic stability, while a surgical \textit{Token-Level Affective Adapter} modulates local tension via direct element-wise residual injection. This minimalist design bypasses the bottlenecks of dense attention and architectural cloning, effectively mitigating the overfitting risks associated with data scarcity. Experiments demonstrate that NarraScore achieves state-of-the-art consistency and narrative alignment with negligible computational overhead, establishing a fully autonomous paradigm for long-video soundtrack generation.

Improved Sampling Schedules for Discrete Diffusion Models

Discrete diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for generative modeling on sequence data; however, the information-theoretic principles governing their reverse processes remain significantly less understood than those of their continuous counterparts. In this work, we bridge this gap by analyzing the reverse process dynamics through the lens of thermodynamic entropy production. We propose the entropy production rate as a rigorous proxy for quantifying information generation, deriving as a byproduct a bound on the Wasserstein distance between intermediate states and the data distribution. Leveraging these insights, we introduce two novel sampling schedules that are uniformly spaced with respect to their corresponding physics-inspired metrics: the Entropic Discrete Schedule (EDS), which is defined by maintaining a constant rate of information gain, and the Wasserstein Discrete Schedule (WDS), which is defined by taking equal steps in terms of the Wasserstein distance. We empirically demonstrate that our proposed schedules significantly outperform state-of-the-art strategies across diverse application domains, including synthetic data, music notation, vision and language modeling, consistently achieving superior performance at a lower computational budget.

Assessing the Effectiveness of Membership Inference on Generative Music

Generative AI systems are quickly improving, now able to produce believable output in several modalities including images, text, and audio. However, this fast development has prompted increased scrutiny concerning user privacy and the use of copyrighted works in training. A recent attack on machine-learning models called membership inference lies at the crossroads of these two concerns. The attack is given as input a set of records and a trained model and seeks to identify which of those records may have been used to train the model. On one hand, this attack can be used to identify user data used to train a model, which may violate their privacy especially in sensitive applications such as models trained on medical data. On the other hand, this attack can be used by rights-holders as evidence that a company used their works without permission to train a model. Remarkably, it appears that no work has studied the effect of membership inference attacks (MIA) on generative music. Given that the music industry is worth billions of dollars and artists would stand to gain from being able to determine if their works were being used without permission, we believe this is a pressing issue to study. As such, in this work we begin a preliminary study into whether MIAs are effective on generative music. We study the effect of several existing attacks on MuseGAN, a popular and influential generative music model. Similar to prior work on generative audio MIAs, our findings suggest that music data is fairly resilient to known membership inference techniques.

Predictive Controlled Music

This paper presents a new approach to algorithmic composition, called predictive controlled music (PCM), which combines model predictive control (MPC) with music generation. PCM uses dynamic models to predict and optimize the music generation process, where musical notes are computed in a manner similar to an MPC problem by optimizing a performance measure. A feedforward neural network-based assessment function is used to evaluate the generated musical score, which serves as the objective function of the PCM optimization problem. Furthermore, a recurrent neural network model is employed to capture the relationships among the variables in the musical notes, and this model is then used to define the constraints in the PCM. Similar to MPC, the proposed PCM computes musical notes in a receding-horizon manner, leading to feedback controlled prediction. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the PCM generation method.

DARC: Drum accompaniment generation with fine-grained rhythm control

In music creation, rapid prototyping is essential for exploring and refining ideas, yet existing generative tools often fall short when users require both structural control and stylistic flexibility. Prior approaches in stem-to-stem generation can condition on other musical stems but offer limited control over rhythm, and timbre-transfer methods allow users to specify specific rhythms, but cannot condition on musical context. We introduce DARC, a generative drum accompaniment model that conditions both on musical context from other stems and explicit rhythm prompts such as beatboxing or tapping tracks. Using parameter-efficient fine-tuning, we augment STAGE, a state-of-the-art drum stem generator, with fine-grained rhythm control while maintaining musical context awareness.