Controllable Video-to-Music Generation with Multiple Time-Varying Conditions

Music enhances video narratives and emotions, driving demand for automatic video-to-music (V2M) generation. However, existing V2M methods relying solely on visual features or supplementary textual inputs generate music in a black-box manner, often failing to meet user expectations. To address this challenge, we propose a novel multi-condition guided V2M generation framework that incorporates multiple time-varying conditions for enhanced control over music generation. Our method uses a two-stage training strategy that enables learning of V2M fundamentals and audiovisual temporal synchronization while meeting users' needs for multi-condition control. In the first stage, we introduce a fine-grained feature selection module and a progressive temporal alignment attention mechanism to ensure flexible feature alignment. For the second stage, we develop a dynamic conditional fusion module and a control-guided decoder module to integrate multiple conditions and accurately guide the music composition process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing V2M pipelines in both subjective and objective evaluations, significantly enhancing control and alignment with user expectations.

Back to Ear: Perceptually Driven High Fidelity Music Reconstruction

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are essential for large-scale audio tasks like diffusion-based generation. However, existing open-source models often neglect auditory perceptual aspects during training, leading to weaknesses in phase accuracy and stereophonic spatial representation. To address these challenges, we propose {\epsilon}ar-VAE, an open-source music signal reconstruction model that rethinks and optimizes the VAE training paradigm. Our contributions are threefold: (i) A K-weighting perceptual filter applied prior to loss calculation to align the objective with auditory perception. (ii) Two novel phase losses: a Correlation Loss for stereo coherence, and a Phase Loss using its derivatives--Instantaneous Frequency and Group Delay--for precision. (iii) A new spectral supervision paradigm where magnitude is supervised by all four Mid/Side/Left/Right components, while phase is supervised only by the LR components. Experiments show {\epsilon}ar-VAE at 44.1kHz substantially outperforms leading open-source models across diverse metrics, showing particular strength in reconstructing high-frequency harmonics and the spatial characteristics.

ACMID: Automatic Curation of Musical Instrument Dataset for 7-Stem Music Source Separation

Most current music source separation (MSS) methods rely on supervised learning, limited by training data quan- tity and quality. Though web-crawling can bring abundant data, platform-level track labeling often causes metadata mismatches, impeding accurate "audio-label" pair acquisi- tion. To address this, we present ACMID: a dataset for MSS generated through web crawling of extensive raw data, fol- lowed by automatic cleaning via an instrument classifier built on a pre-trained audio encoder that filters and aggregates clean segments of target instruments from the crawled tracks, resulting in the refined ACMID-Cleaned dataset. Leverag- ing abundant data, we expand the conventional classifica- tion from 4-stem (Vocal/Bass/Drums/Others) to 7-stem (Pi- ano/Drums/Bass/Acoustic Guitar/Electric Guitar/Strings/Wind- Brass), enabling high granularity MSS systems. Experiments on SOTA MSS model demonstrates two key results: (i) MSS model trained with ACMID-Cleaned achieved a 2.39dB improvement in SDR performance compared to that with ACMID-Uncleaned, demostrating the effectiveness of our data cleaning procedure; (ii) incorporating ACMID-Cleaned to training enhances MSS model's average performance by 1.16dB, confirming the value of our dataset. Our data crawl- ing code, cleaning model code and weights are available at: https://github.com/scottishfold0621/ACMID.

Live Music Models

We introduce a new class of generative models for music called live music models that produce a continuous stream of music in real-time with synchronized user control. We release Magenta RealTime, an open-weights live music model that can be steered using text or audio prompts to control acoustic style. On automatic metrics of music quality, Magenta RealTime outperforms other open-weights music generation models, despite using fewer parameters and offering first-of-its-kind live generation capabilities. We also release Lyria RealTime, an API-based model with extended controls, offering access to our most powerful model with wide prompt coverage. These models demonstrate a new paradigm for AI-assisted music creation that emphasizes human-in-the-loop interaction for live music performance.

WildScore: Benchmarking MLLMs in-the-Wild Symbolic Music Reasoning

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various vision-language tasks. However, their reasoning abilities in the multimodal symbolic music domain remain largely unexplored. We introduce WildScore, the first in-the-wild multimodal symbolic music reasoning and analysis benchmark, designed to evaluate MLLMs' capacity to interpret real-world music scores and answer complex musicological queries. Each instance in WildScore is sourced from genuine musical compositions and accompanied by authentic user-generated questions and discussions, capturing the intricacies of practical music analysis. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we propose a systematic taxonomy, comprising both high-level and fine-grained musicological ontologies. Furthermore, we frame complex music reasoning as multiple-choice question answering, enabling controlled and scalable assessment of MLLMs' symbolic music understanding. Empirical benchmarking of state-of-the-art MLLMs on WildScore reveals intriguing patterns in their visual-symbolic reasoning, uncovering both promising directions and persistent challenges for MLLMs in symbolic music reasoning and analysis. We release the dataset and code.

Synthesizing Sheet Music Problems for Evaluation and Reinforcement Learning

Enhancing the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to interpret sheet music is a crucial step toward building AI musicians. However, current research lacks both evaluation benchmarks and training data for sheet music reasoning. To address this, we propose the idea of synthesizing sheet music problems grounded in music theory, which can serve both as evaluation benchmarks and as training data for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). We introduce a data synthesis framework that generates verifiable sheet music questions in both textual and visual modalities, leading to the Synthetic Sheet Music Reasoning Benchmark (SSMR-Bench) and a complementary training set. Evaluation results on SSMR-Bench show the importance of models' reasoning abilities in interpreting sheet music. At the same time, the poor performance of Gemini 2.5-Pro highlights the challenges that MLLMs still face in interpreting sheet music in a visual format. By leveraging synthetic data for RLVR, Qwen3-8B-Base and Qwen2.5-VL-Instruct achieve improvements on the SSMR-Bench. Besides, the trained Qwen3-8B-Base surpasses GPT-4 in overall performance on MusicTheoryBench and achieves reasoning performance comparable to GPT-4 with the strategies of Role play and Chain-of-Thought. Notably, its performance on math problems also improves relative to the original Qwen3-8B-Base. Furthermore, our results show that the enhanced reasoning ability can also facilitate music composition. In conclusion, we are the first to propose the idea of synthesizing sheet music problems based on music theory rules, and demonstrate its effectiveness not only in advancing model reasoning for sheet music understanding but also in unlocking new possibilities for AI-assisted music creation.

The Rhythm In Anything: Audio-Prompted Drums Generation with Masked Language Modeling

Musicians and nonmusicians alike use rhythmic sound gestures, such as tapping and beatboxing, to express drum patterns. While these gestures effectively communicate musical ideas, realizing these ideas as fully-produced drum recordings can be time-consuming, potentially disrupting many creative workflows. To bridge this gap, we present TRIA (The Rhythm In Anything), a masked transformer model for mapping rhythmic sound gestures to high-fidelity drum recordings. Given an audio prompt of the desired rhythmic pattern and a second prompt to represent drumkit timbre, TRIA produces audio of a drumkit playing the desired rhythm (with appropriate elaborations) in the desired timbre. Subjective and objective evaluations show that a TRIA model trained on less than 10 hours of publicly-available drum data can generate high-quality, faithful realizations of sound gestures across a wide range of timbres in a zero-shot manner.

TISDiSS: A Training-Time and Inference-Time Scalable Framework for Discriminative Source Separation

Source separation is a fundamental task in speech, music, and audio processing, and it also provides cleaner and larger data for training generative models. However, improving separation performance in practice often depends on increasingly large networks, inflating training and deployment costs. Motivated by recent advances in inference-time scaling for generative modeling, we propose Training-Time and Inference-Time Scalable Discriminative Source Separation (TISDiSS), a unified framework that integrates early-split multi-loss supervision, shared-parameter design, and dynamic inference repetitions. TISDiSS enables flexible speed-performance trade-offs by adjusting inference depth without retraining additional models. We further provide systematic analyses of architectural and training choices and show that training with more inference repetitions improves shallow-inference performance, benefiting low-latency applications. Experiments on standard speech separation benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with a reduced parameter count, establishing TISDiSS as a scalable and practical framework for adaptive source separation.

MelCap: A Unified Single-Codebook Neural Codec for High-Fidelity Audio Compression

Neural audio codecs have recently emerged as powerful tools for high-quality and low-bitrate audio compression, leveraging deep generative models to learn latent representations of audio signals. However, existing approaches either rely on a single quantizer that only processes speech domain, or on multiple quantizers that are not well suited for downstream tasks. To address this issue, we propose MelCap, a unified "one-codebook-for-all" neural codec that effectively handles speech, music, and general sound. By decomposing audio reconstruction into two stages, our method preserves more acoustic details than previous single-codebook approaches, while achieving performance comparable to mainstream multi-codebook methods. In the first stage, audio is transformed into mel-spectrograms, which are compressed and quantized into compact single tokens using a 2D tokenizer. A perceptual loss is further applied to mitigate the over-smoothing artifacts observed in spectrogram reconstruction. In the second stage, a Vocoder recovers waveforms from the mel discrete tokens in a single forward pass, enabling real-time decoding. Both objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that MelCap achieves quality on comparable to state-of-the-art multi-codebook codecs, while retaining the computational simplicity of a single-codebook design, thereby providing an effective representation for downstream tasks.

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.