Improving Perceptual Audio Aesthetic Assessment via Triplet Loss and Self-Supervised Embeddings

We present a system for automatic multi-axis perceptual quality prediction of generative audio, developed for Track 2 of the AudioMOS Challenge 2025. The task is to predict four Audio Aesthetic Scores--Production Quality, Production Complexity, Content Enjoyment, and Content Usefulness--for audio generated by text-to-speech (TTS), text-to-audio (TTA), and text-to-music (TTM) systems. A main challenge is the domain shift between natural training data and synthetic evaluation data. To address this, we combine BEATs, a pretrained transformer-based audio representation model, with a multi-branch long short-term memory (LSTM) predictor and use a triplet loss with buffer-based sampling to structure the embedding space by perceptual similarity. Our results show that this improves embedding discriminability and generalization, enabling domain-robust audio quality assessment without synthetic training data.

Biases in LLM-Generated Musical Taste Profiles for Recommendation

One particularly promising use case of Large Language Models (LLMs) for recommendation is the automatic generation of Natural Language (NL) user taste profiles from consumption data. These profiles offer interpretable and editable alternatives to opaque collaborative filtering representations, enabling greater transparency and user control. However, it remains unclear whether users consider these profiles to be an accurate representation of their taste, which is crucial for trust and usability. Moreover, because LLMs inherit societal and data-driven biases, profile quality may systematically vary across user and item characteristics. In this paper, we study this issue in the context of music streaming, where personalization is challenged by a large and culturally diverse catalog. We conduct a user study in which participants rate NL profiles generated from their own listening histories. We analyze whether identification with the profiles is biased by user attributes (e.g., mainstreamness, taste diversity) and item features (e.g., genre, country of origin). We also compare these patterns to those observed when using the profiles in a downstream recommendation task. Our findings highlight both the potential and limitations of scrutable, LLM-based profiling in personalized systems.

DeformTune: A Deformable XAI Music Prototype for Non-Musicians

Many existing AI music generation tools rely on text prompts, complex interfaces, or instrument-like controls, which may require musical or technical knowledge that non-musicians do not possess. This paper introduces DeformTune, a prototype system that combines a tactile deformable interface with the MeasureVAE model to explore more intuitive, embodied, and explainable AI interaction. We conducted a preliminary study with 11 adult participants without formal musical training to investigate their experience with AI-assisted music creation. Thematic analysis of their feedback revealed recurring challenge--including unclear control mappings, limited expressive range, and the need for guidance throughout use. We discuss several design opportunities for enhancing explainability of AI, including multimodal feedback and progressive interaction support. These findings contribute early insights toward making AI music systems more explainable and empowering for novice users.

Exploring State-Space-Model based Language Model in Music Generation

The recent surge in State Space Models (SSMs), particularly the emergence of Mamba, has established them as strong alternatives or complementary modules to Transformers across diverse domains. In this work, we aim to explore the potential of Mamba-based architectures for text-to-music generation. We adopt discrete tokens of Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) as the modeling representation and empirically find that a single-layer codebook can capture semantic information in music. Motivated by this observation, we focus on modeling a single-codebook representation and adapt SiMBA, originally designed as a Mamba-based encoder, to function as a decoder for sequence modeling. We compare its performance against a standard Transformer-based decoder. Our results suggest that, under limited-resource settings, SiMBA achieves much faster convergence and generates outputs closer to the ground truth. This demonstrates the promise of SSMs for efficient and expressive text-to-music generation. We put audio examples on Github.

Exploring Procedural Data Generation for Automatic Acoustic Guitar Fingerpicking Transcription

Automatic transcription of acoustic guitar fingerpicking performances remains a challenging task due to the scarcity of labeled training data and legal constraints connected with musical recordings. This work investigates a procedural data generation pipeline as an alternative to real audio recordings for training transcription models. Our approach synthesizes training data through four stages: knowledge-based fingerpicking tablature composition, MIDI performance rendering, physical modeling using an extended Karplus-Strong algorithm, and audio augmentation including reverb and distortion. We train and evaluate a CRNN-based note-tracking model on both real and synthetic datasets, demonstrating that procedural data can be used to achieve reasonable note-tracking results. Finetuning with a small amount of real data further enhances transcription accuracy, improving over models trained exclusively on real recordings. These results highlight the potential of procedurally generated audio for data-scarce music information retrieval tasks.

VoiceAssistant-Eval: Benchmarking AI Assistants across Listening, Speaking, and Viewing

The growing capabilities of large language models and multimodal systems have spurred interest in voice-first AI assistants, yet existing benchmarks are inadequate for evaluating the full range of these systems' capabilities. We introduce VoiceAssistant-Eval, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess AI assistants across listening, speaking, and viewing. VoiceAssistant-Eval comprises 10,497 curated examples spanning 13 task categories. These tasks include natural sounds, music, and spoken dialogue for listening; multi-turn dialogue, role-play imitation, and various scenarios for speaking; and highly heterogeneous images for viewing. To demonstrate its utility, we evaluate 21 open-source models and GPT-4o-Audio, measuring the quality of the response content and speech, as well as their consistency. The results reveal three key findings: (1) proprietary models do not universally outperform open-source models; (2) most models excel at speaking tasks but lag in audio understanding; and (3) well-designed smaller models can rival much larger ones. Notably, the mid-sized Step-Audio-2-mini (7B) achieves more than double the listening accuracy of LLaMA-Omni2-32B-Bilingual. However, challenges remain: multimodal (audio plus visual) input and role-play voice imitation tasks are difficult for current models, and significant gaps persist in robustness and safety alignment. VoiceAssistant-Eval identifies these gaps and establishes a rigorous framework for evaluating and guiding the development of next-generation AI assistants. Code and data will be released at https://mathllm.github.io/VoiceAssistantEval/ .

Embedding Alignment in Code Generation for Audio

LLM-powered code generation has the potential to revolutionize creative coding endeavors, such as live-coding, by enabling users to focus on structural motifs over syntactic details. In such domains, when prompting an LLM, users may benefit from considering multiple varied code candidates to better realize their musical intentions. Code generation models, however, struggle to present unique and diverse code candidates, with no direct insight into the code's audio output. To better establish a relationship between code candidates and produced audio, we investigate the topology of the mapping between code and audio embedding spaces. We find that code and audio embeddings do not exhibit a simple linear relationship, but supplement this with a constructed predictive model that shows an embedding alignment map could be learned. Supplementing the aim for musically diverse output, we present a model that given code predicts output audio embedding, constructing a code-audio embedding alignment map.

MAIA: An Inpainting-Based Approach for Music Adversarial Attacks

Music adversarial attacks have garnered significant interest in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). In this paper, we present Music Adversarial Inpainting Attack (MAIA), a novel adversarial attack framework that supports both white-box and black-box attack scenarios. MAIA begins with an importance analysis to identify critical audio segments, which are then targeted for modification. Utilizing generative inpainting models, these segments are reconstructed with guidance from the output of the attacked model, ensuring subtle and effective adversarial perturbations. We evaluate MAIA on multiple MIR tasks, demonstrating high attack success rates in both white-box and black-box settings while maintaining minimal perceptual distortion. Additionally, subjective listening tests confirm the high audio fidelity of the adversarial samples. Our findings highlight vulnerabilities in current MIR systems and emphasize the need for more robust and secure models.

Towards Hallucination-Free Music: A Reinforcement Learning Preference Optimization Framework for Reliable Song Generation

Recent advances in audio-based generative language models have accelerated AI-driven lyric-to-song generation. However, these models frequently suffer from content hallucination, producing outputs misaligned with the input lyrics and undermining musical coherence. Current supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches, limited by passive label-fitting, exhibit constrained self-improvement and poor hallucination mitigation. To address this core challenge, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework leveraging preference optimization for hallucination control. Our key contributions include: (1) Developing a robust hallucination preference dataset constructed via phoneme error rate (PER) computation and rule-based filtering to capture alignment with human expectations; (2) Implementing and evaluating three distinct preference optimization strategies within the RL framework: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). DPO operates off-policy to enhance positive token likelihood, achieving a significant 7.4% PER reduction. PPO and GRPO employ an on-policy approach, training a PER-based reward model to iteratively optimize sequences via reward maximization and KL-regularization, yielding PER reductions of 4.9% and 4.7%, respectively. Comprehensive objective and subjective evaluations confirm that our methods effectively suppress hallucinations while preserving musical quality. Crucially, this work presents a systematic, RL-based solution to hallucination control in lyric-to-song generation. The framework's transferability also unlocks potential for music style adherence and musicality enhancement, opening new avenues for future generative song research.

QAMRO: Quality-aware Adaptive Margin Ranking Optimization for Human-aligned Assessment of Audio Generation Systems

Evaluating audio generation systems, including text-to-music (TTM), text-to-speech (TTS), and text-to-audio (TTA), remains challenging due to the subjective and multi-dimensional nature of human perception. Existing methods treat mean opinion score (MOS) prediction as a regression problem, but standard regression losses overlook the relativity of perceptual judgments. To address this limitation, we introduce QAMRO, a novel Quality-aware Adaptive Margin Ranking Optimization framework that seamlessly integrates regression objectives from different perspectives, aiming to highlight perceptual differences and prioritize accurate ratings. Our framework leverages pre-trained audio-text models such as CLAP and Audiobox-Aesthetics, and is trained exclusively on the official AudioMOS Challenge 2025 dataset. It demonstrates superior alignment with human evaluations across all dimensions, significantly outperforming robust baseline models.