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.

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.

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.

Human Motion Video Generation: A Survey

Human motion video generation has garnered significant research interest due to its broad applications, enabling innovations such as photorealistic singing heads or dynamic avatars that seamlessly dance to music. However, existing surveys in this field focus on individual methods, lacking a comprehensive overview of the entire generative process. This paper addresses this gap by providing an in-depth survey of human motion video generation, encompassing over ten sub-tasks, and detailing the five key phases of the generation process: input, motion planning, motion video generation, refinement, and output. Notably, this is the first survey that discusses the potential of large language models in enhancing human motion video generation. Our survey reviews the latest developments and technological trends in human motion video generation across three primary modalities: vision, text, and audio. By covering over two hundred papers, we offer a thorough overview of the field and highlight milestone works that have driven significant technological breakthroughs. Our goal for this survey is to unveil the prospects of human motion video generation and serve as a valuable resource for advancing the comprehensive applications of digital humans. A complete list of the models examined in this survey is available in Our Repository https://github.com/Winn1y/Awesome-Human-Motion-Video-Generation.

Benchmarking Music Generation Models and Metrics via Human Preference Studies

Recent advancements have brought generated music closer to human-created compositions, yet evaluating these models remains challenging. While human preference is the gold standard for assessing quality, translating these subjective judgments into objective metrics, particularly for text-audio alignment and music quality, has proven difficult. In this work, we generate 6k songs using 12 state-of-the-art models and conduct a survey of 15k pairwise audio comparisons with 2.5k human participants to evaluate the correlation between human preferences and widely used metrics. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to rank current state-of-the-art music generation models and metrics based on human preference. To further the field of subjective metric evaluation, we provide open access to our dataset of generated music and human evaluations.

Timbre-Adaptive Transcription: A Lightweight Architecture with Associative Memory for Dynamic Instrument Separation

Existing multi-timbre transcription models struggle with generalization beyond pre-trained instruments and rigid source-count constraints. We address these limitations with a lightweight deep clustering solution featuring: 1) a timbre-agnostic backbone achieving state-of-the-art performance with only half the parameters of comparable models, and 2) a novel associative memory mechanism that mimics human auditory cognition to dynamically encode unseen timbres via attention-based clustering. Our biologically-inspired framework enables adaptive polyphonic separation with minimal training data (12.5 minutes), supported by a new synthetic dataset method offering cost-effective, high-precision multi-timbre generation. Experiments show the timbre-agnostic transcription model outperforms existing models on public benchmarks, while the separation module demonstrates promising timbre discrimination. This work provides an efficient framework for timbre-related music transcription and explores new directions for timbre-aware separation through cognitive-inspired architectures.