SyncTrack: Rhythmic Stability and Synchronization in Multi-Track Music Generation

Multi-track music generation has garnered significant research interest due to its precise mixing and remixing capabilities. However, existing models often overlook essential attributes such as rhythmic stability and synchronization, leading to a focus on differences between tracks rather than their inherent properties. In this paper, we introduce SyncTrack, a synchronous multi-track waveform music generation model designed to capture the unique characteristics of multi-track music. SyncTrack features a novel architecture that includes track-shared modules to establish a common rhythm across all tracks and track-specific modules to accommodate diverse timbres and pitch ranges. Each track-shared module employs two cross-track attention mechanisms to synchronize rhythmic information, while each track-specific module utilizes learnable instrument priors to better represent timbre and other unique features. Additionally, we enhance the evaluation of multi-track music quality by introducing rhythmic consistency through three novel metrics: Inner-track Rhythmic Stability (IRS), Cross-track Beat Synchronization (CBS), and Cross-track Beat Dispersion (CBD). Experiments demonstrate that SyncTrack significantly improves the multi-track music quality by enhancing rhythmic consistency.

Efficient Long-Sequence Diffusion Modeling for Symbolic Music Generation

Symbolic music generation is a challenging task in multimedia generation, involving long sequences with hierarchical temporal structures, long-range dependencies, and fine-grained local details. Though recent diffusion-based models produce high quality generations, they tend to suffer from high training and inference costs with long symbolic sequences due to iterative denoising and sequence-length-related costs. To deal with such problem, we put forth a diffusing strategy named SMDIM to combine efficient global structure construction and light local refinement. SMDIM uses structured state space models to capture long range musical context at near linear cost, and selectively refines local musical details via a hybrid refinement scheme. Experiments performed on a wide range of symbolic music datasets which encompass various Western classical music, popular music and traditional folk music show that the SMDIM model outperforms the other state-of-the-art approaches on both the generation quality and the computational efficiency, and it has robust generalization to underexplored musical styles. These results show that SMDIM offers a principled solution for long-sequence symbolic music generation, including associated attributes that accompany the sequences. We provide a project webpage with audio examples and supplementary materials at https://3328702107.github.io/smdim-music/.

CutClaw: Agentic Hours-Long Video Editing via Music Synchronization

Editing the video content with audio alignment forms a digital human-made art in current social media. However, the time-consuming and repetitive nature of manual video editing has long been a challenge for filmmakers and professional content creators alike. In this paper, we introduce CutClaw, an autonomous multi-agent framework designed to edit hours-long raw footage into meaningful short videos that leverages the capabilities of multiple Multimodal Language Models~(MLLMs) as an agent system. It produces videos with synchronized music, followed by instructions, and a visually appealing appearance. In detail, our approach begins by employing a hierarchical multimodal decomposition that captures both fine-grained details and global structures across visual and audio footage. Then, to ensure narrative consistency, a Playwriter Agent orchestrates the whole storytelling flow and structures the long-term narrative, anchoring visual scenes to musical shifts. Finally, to construct a short edited video, Editor and Reviewer Agents collaboratively optimize the final cut via selecting fine-grained visual content based on rigorous aesthetic and semantic criteria. We conduct detailed experiments to demonstrate that CutClaw significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating high-quality, rhythm-aligned videos. The code is available at: https://github.com/GVCLab/CutClaw.

SongSong: A Time Phonograph for Chinese SongCi Music from Thousand of Years Away

Recently, there have been significant advancements in music generation. However, existing models primarily focus on creating modern pop songs, making it challenging to produce ancient music with distinct rhythms and styles, such as ancient Chinese SongCi. In this paper, we introduce SongSong, the first music generation model capable of restoring Chinese SongCi to our knowledge. Our model first predicts the melody from the input SongCi, then separately generates the singing voice and accompaniment based on that melody, and finally combines all elements to create the final piece of music. Additionally, to address the lack of ancient music datasets, we create OpenSongSong, a comprehensive dataset of ancient Chinese SongCi music, featuring 29.9 hours of compositions by various renowned SongCi music masters. To assess SongSong's proficiency in performing SongCi, we randomly select 85 SongCi sentences that were not part of the training set for evaluation against SongSong and music generation platforms such as Suno and SkyMusic. The subjective and objective outcomes indicate that our proposed model achieves leading performance in generating high-quality SongCi music.

CMI-RewardBench: Evaluating Music Reward Models with Compositional Multimodal Instruction

While music generation models have evolved to handle complex multimodal inputs mixing text, lyrics, and reference audio, evaluation mechanisms have lagged behind. In this paper, we bridge this critical gap by establishing a comprehensive ecosystem for music reward modeling under Compositional Multimodal Instruction (CMI), where the generated music may be conditioned on text descriptions, lyrics, and audio prompts. We first introduce CMI-Pref-Pseudo, a large-scale preference dataset comprising 110k pseudo-labeled samples, and CMI-Pref, a high-quality, human-annotated corpus tailored for fine-grained alignment tasks. To unify the evaluation landscape, we propose CMI-RewardBench, a unified benchmark that evaluates music reward models on heterogeneous samples across musicality, text-music alignment, and compositional instruction alignment. Leveraging these resources, we develop CMI reward models (CMI-RMs), a parameter-efficient reward model family capable of processing heterogeneous inputs. We evaluate their correlation with human judgments scores on musicality and alignment on CMI-Pref along with previous datasets. Further experiments demonstrate that CMI-RM not only correlates strongly with human judgments, but also enables effective inference-time scaling via top-k filtering. The necessary training data, benchmarks, and reward models are publicly available.

OmniCodec: Low Frame Rate Universal Audio Codec with Semantic-Acoustic Disentanglement

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced audio generation through discrete representation learning. However, most existing neural codecs focus on speech and emphasize reconstruction fidelity, overlooking unified low frame rate modeling across diverse audio domains, including speech, music, and general sound. Moreover, high reconstruction quality does not necessarily yield semantically informative representations, limiting effectiveness in downstream generation tasks. We propose OmniCodec, a universal neural audio codec tailored for low frame rate. It adopts a hierarchical multi-codebook design with semantic-acoustic decoupling by leveraging the audio encoder of the pre-trained understanding model, along with a self-guidance strategy to improve codebook utilization and reconstruction. Compared with the Mimi codec, experiments show that OmniCodec achieves outstanding performance at the same bitrate, delivering superior reconstruction quality while also providing more semantically informative representations that benefit downstream generation tasks. Our model and code will be open-sourced. Our demo page is available.

Cinematic Audio Source Separation Using Visual Cues

Cinematic Audio Source Separation (CASS) aims to decompose mixed film audio into speech, music, and sound effects, enabling applications like dubbing and remastering. Existing CASS approaches are audio-only, overlooking the inherent audio-visual nature of films, where sounds often align with visual cues. We present the first framework for audio-visual CASS (AV-CASS), leveraging visual context to enhance separation quality. Our method formulates CASS as a conditional generative modeling problem using conditional flow matching, enabling multimodal audio source separation. To address the lack of cinematic datasets with isolated sound tracks, we introduce a training data synthesis pipeline that pairs in-the-wild audio and video streams (e.g., facial videos for speech, scene videos for effects) and design a dedicated visual encoder for this dual-stream setup. Trained entirely on synthetic data, our model generalizes effectively to real-world cinematic content and achieves strong performance on synthetic, real-world, and audio-only CASS benchmarks. Code and demo are available at \url{https://cass-flowmatching.github.io}.

Not Like Transformers: Drop the Beat Representation for Dance Generation with Mamba-Based Diffusion Model

Dance is a form of human motion characterized by emotional expression and communication, playing a role in various fields such as music, virtual reality, and content creation. Existing methods for dance generation often fail to adequately capture the inherently sequential, rhythmical, and music-synchronized characteristics of dance. In this paper, we propose \emph{MambaDance}, a new dance generation approach that leverages a Mamba-based diffusion model. Mamba, well-suited to handling long and autoregressive sequences, is integrated into our two-stage diffusion architecture, substituting off-the-shelf Transformer. Additionally, considering the critical role of musical beats in dance choreography, we propose a Gaussian-based beat representation to explicitly guide the decoding of dance sequences. Experiments on AIST++ and FineDance datasets for each sequence length show that our proposed method effectively generates plausible dance movements while reflecting essential characteristics, consistently from short to long dances, compared to the previous methods. Additional qualitative results and demo videos are available at \small{https://vision3d-lab.github.io/mambadance}.

Art2Mus: Artwork-to-Music Generation via Visual Conditioning and Large-Scale Cross-Modal Alignment

Music generation has advanced markedly through multimodal deep learning, enabling models to synthesize audio from text and, more recently, from images. However, existing image-conditioned systems suffer from two fundamental limitations: (i) they are typically trained on natural photographs, limiting their ability to capture the richer semantic, stylistic, and cultural content of artworks; and (ii) most rely on an image-to-text conversion stage, using language as a semantic shortcut that simplifies conditioning but prevents direct visual-to-audio learning. Motivated by these gaps, we introduce ArtSound, a large-scale multimodal dataset of 105,884 artwork-music pairs enriched with dual-modality captions, obtained by extending ArtGraph and the Free Music Archive. We further propose ArtToMus, the first framework explicitly designed for direct artwork-to-music generation, which maps digitized artworks to music without image-to-text translation or language-based semantic supervision. The framework projects visual embeddings into the conditioning space of a latent diffusion model, enabling music synthesis guided solely by visual information. Experimental results show that ArtToMus generates musically coherent and stylistically consistent outputs that reflect salient visual cues of the source artworks. While absolute alignment scores remain lower than those of text-conditioned systems-as expected given the substantially increased difficulty of removing linguistic supervision-ArtToMus achieves competitive perceptual quality and meaningful cross-modal correspondence. This work establishes direct visual-to-music generation as a distinct and challenging research direction, and provides resources that support applications in multimedia art, cultural heritage, and AI-assisted creative practice. Code and dataset will be publicly released upon acceptance.

Evaluating Disentangled Representations for Controllable Music Generation

Recent approaches in music generation rely on disentangled representations, often labeled as structure and timbre or local and global, to enable controllable synthesis. Yet the underlying properties of these embeddings remain underexplored. In this work, we evaluate such disentangled representations in a set of music audio models for controllable generation using a probing-based framework that goes beyond standard downstream tasks. The selected models reflect diverse unsupervised disentanglement strategies, including inductive biases, data augmentations, adversarial objectives, and staged training procedures. We further isolate specific strategies to analyze their effect. Our analysis spans four key axes: informativeness, equivariance, invariance, and disentanglement, which are assessed across datasets, tasks, and controlled transformations. Our findings reveal inconsistencies between intended and actual semantics of the embeddings, suggesting that current strategies fall short of producing truly disentangled representations, and prompting a re-examination of how controllability is approached in music generation.