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.

DTT-BSR: GAN-based DTTNet with RoPE Transformer Enhancement for Music Source Restoration

Music source restoration (MSR) aims to recover unprocessed stems from mixed and mastered recordings. The challenge lies in both separating overlapping sources and reconstructing signals degraded by production effects such as compression and reverberation. We therefore propose DTT-BSR, a hybrid generative adversarial network (GAN) combining rotary positional embeddings (RoPE) transformer for long-term temporal modeling with dual-path band-split recurrent neural network (RNN) for multi-resolution spectral processing. Our model achieved 3rd place on the objective leaderboard and 4th place on the subjective leaderboard on the ICASSP 2026 MSR Challenge, demonstrating exceptional generation fidelity and semantic alignment with a compact size of 7.1M parameters.

VidTune: Creating Video Soundtracks with Generative Music and Contextual Thumbnails

Music shapes the tone of videos, yet creators often struggle to find soundtracks that match their video's mood and narrative. Recent text-to-music models let creators generate music from text prompts, but our formative study (N=8) shows creators struggle to construct diverse prompts, quickly review and compare tracks, and understand their impact on the video. We present VidTune, a system that supports soundtrack creation by generating diverse music options from a creator's prompt and producing contextual thumbnails for rapid review. VidTune extracts representative video subjects to ground thumbnails in context, maps each track's valence and energy onto visual cues like color and brightness, and depicts prominent genres and instruments. Creators can refine tracks through natural language edits, which VidTune expands into new generations. In a controlled user study (N=12) and an exploratory case study (N=6), participants found VidTune helpful for efficiently reviewing and comparing music options and described the process as playful and enriching.

Training-Efficient Text-to-Music Generation with State-Space Modeling

Recent advances in text-to-music generation (TTM) have yielded high-quality results, but often at the cost of extensive compute and the use of large proprietary internal data. To improve the affordability and openness of TTM training, an open-source generative model backbone that is more training- and data-efficient is needed. In this paper, we constrain the number of trainable parameters in the generative model to match that of the MusicGen-small benchmark (with about 300M parameters), and replace its Transformer backbone with the emerging class of state-space models (SSMs). Specifically, we explore different SSM variants for sequence modeling, and compare a single-stage SSM-based design with a decomposable two-stage SSM/diffusion hybrid design. All proposed models are trained from scratch on a purely public dataset comprising 457 hours of CC-licensed music, ensuring full openness. Our experimental findings are three-fold. First, we show that SSMs exhibit superior training efficiency compared to the Transformer counterpart. Second, despite using only 9% of the FLOPs and 2% of the training data size compared to the MusicGen-small benchmark, our model achieves competitive performance in both objective metrics and subjective listening tests based on MusicCaps captions. Finally, our scaling-down experiment demonstrates that SSMs can maintain competitive performance relative to the Transformer baseline even at the same training budget (measured in iterations), when the model size is reduced to four times smaller. To facilitate the democratization of TTM research, the processed captions, model checkpoints, and source code are available on GitHub via the project page: https://lonian6.github.io/ssmttm/.

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.

SoulX-Singer: Towards High-Quality Zero-Shot Singing Voice Synthesis

While recent years have witnessed rapid progress in speech synthesis, open-source singing voice synthesis (SVS) systems still face significant barriers to industrial deployment, particularly in terms of robustness and zero-shot generalization. In this report, we introduce SoulX-Singer, a high-quality open-source SVS system designed with practical deployment considerations in mind. SoulX-Singer supports controllable singing generation conditioned on either symbolic musical scores (MIDI) or melodic representations, enabling flexible and expressive control in real-world production workflows. Trained on more than 42,000 hours of vocal data, the system supports Mandarin Chinese, English, and Cantonese and consistently achieves state-of-the-art synthesis quality across languages under diverse musical conditions. Furthermore, to enable reliable evaluation of zero-shot SVS performance in practical scenarios, we construct SoulX-Singer-Eval, a dedicated benchmark with strict training-test disentanglement, facilitating systematic assessment in zero-shot settings.

EuleroDec: A Complex-Valued RVQ-VAE for Efficient and Robust Audio Coding

Audio codecs power discrete music generative modelling, music streaming, and immersive media by shrinking PCM audio to bandwidth-friendly bitrates. Recent works have gravitated towards processing in the spectral domain; however, spectrogram domains typically struggle with phase modeling, which is naturally complex-valued. Most frequency-domain neural codecs either disregard phase information or encode it as two separate real-valued channels, limiting spatial fidelity. This entails the need to introduce adversarial discriminators at the expense of convergence speed and training stability to compensate for the inadequate representation power of the audio signal. In this work we introduce an end-to-end complex-valued RVQ-VAE audio codec that preserves magnitude-phase coupling across the entire analysis-quantization-synthesis pipeline and removes adversarial discriminators and diffusion post-filters. Without GANs or diffusion, we match or surpass much longer-trained baselines in-domain and reach SOTA out-of-domain performance on phase coherence and waveform fidelity. Compared to standard baselines that train for hundreds of thousands of steps, our model, which reduces the training budget by an order of magnitude, is markedly more compute-efficient while preserving high perceptual quality.

TADA! Tuning Audio Diffusion Models through Activation Steering

Audio diffusion models can synthesize high-fidelity music from text, yet their internal mechanisms for representing high-level concepts remain poorly understood. In this work, we use activation patching to demonstrate that distinct semantic musical concepts, such as the presence of specific instruments, vocals, or genre characteristics, are controlled by a small, shared subset of attention layers in state-of-the-art audio diffusion architectures. Next, we demonstrate that applying Contrastive Activation Addition and Sparse Autoencoders in these layers enables more precise control over the generated audio, indicating a direct benefit of the specialization phenomenon. By steering activations of the identified layers, we can alter specific musical elements with high precision, such as modulating tempo or changing a track's mood.

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.

FusID: Modality-Fused Semantic IDs for Generative Music Recommendation

Generative recommendation systems have achieved significant advances by leveraging semantic IDs to represent items. However, existing approaches that tokenize each modality independently face two critical limitations: (1) redundancy across modalities that reduces efficiency, and (2) failure to capture inter-modal interactions that limits item representation. We introduce FusID, a modality-fused semantic ID framework that addresses these limitations through three key components: (i) multimodal fusion that learns unified representations by jointly encoding information across modalities, (ii) representation learning that brings frequently co-occurring item embeddings closer while maintaining distinctiveness and preventing feature redundancy, and (iii) product quantization that converts the fused continuous embeddings into multiple discrete tokens to mitigate ID conflict. Evaluated on a multimodal next-song recommendation (i.e., playlist continuation) benchmark, FusID achieves zero ID conflicts, ensuring that each token sequence maps to exactly one song, mitigates codebook underutilization, and outperforms baselines in terms of MRR and Recall@k (k = 1, 5, 10, 20).