Song Aesthetics Evaluation with Multi-Stem Attention and Hierarchical Uncertainty Modeling

Music generative artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly expanding music content, necessitating automated song aesthetics evaluation. However, existing studies largely focus on speech, audio or singing quality, leaving song aesthetics underexplored. Moreover, conventional approaches often predict a precise Mean Opinion Score (MOS) value directly, which struggles to capture the nuances of human perception in song aesthetics evaluation. This paper proposes a song-oriented aesthetics evaluation framework, featuring two novel modules: 1) Multi-Stem Attention Fusion (MSAF) builds bidirectional cross-attention between mixture-vocal and mixture-accompaniment pairs, fusing them to capture complex musical features; 2) Hierarchical Granularity-Aware Interval Aggregation (HiGIA) learns multi-granularity score probability distributions, aggregates them into a score interval, and applies a regression within the interval to produce the final score. We evaluated on two datasets of full-length songs: SongEval dataset (AI-generated) and an internal aesthetics dataset (human-created), and compared with two state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. Results show that the proposed method achieves stronger performance for multi-dimensional song aesthetics evaluation.

Do Neural Codecs Generalize? A Controlled Study Across Unseen Languages and Non-Speech Tasks

This paper investigates three crucial yet underexplored aspects of the generalization capabilities of neural audio codecs (NACs): (i) whether NACs can generalize to unseen languages during pre-training, (ii) whether speech-only pre-trained NACs can effectively generalize to non-speech applications such as environmental sounds, music, and animal vocalizations, and (iii) whether incorporating non-speech data during pre-training can improve performance on both speech and non-speech tasks. Existing studies typically rely on off-the-shelf NACs for comparison, which limits insight due to variations in implementation. In this work, we train NACs from scratch using strictly controlled configurations and carefully curated pre-training data to enable fair comparisons. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of NAC performance on both signal reconstruction quality and downstream applications using 11 metrics. Our results show that NACs can generalize to unseen languages during pre-training, speech-only pre-trained NACs exhibit degraded performance on non-speech tasks, and incorporating non-speech data during pre-training improves performance on non-speech tasks while maintaining comparable performance on speech tasks.

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.

MuseAgent-1: Interactive Grounded Multimodal Understanding of Music Scores and Performance Audio

Despite recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their ability to understand and interact with music remains limited. Music understanding requires grounded reasoning over symbolic scores and expressive performance audio, which general-purpose MLLMs often fail to handle due to insufficient perceptual grounding. We introduce MuseAgent, a music-centric multimodal agent that augments language models with structured symbolic representations derived from sheet music images and performance audio. By integrating optical music recognition and automatic music transcription modules, MuseAgent enables multi-step reasoning and interaction over fine-grained musical content. To systematically evaluate music understanding capabilities, we further propose MuseBench, a benchmark covering music theory reasoning, score interpretation, and performance-level analysis across text, image, and audio modalities. Experiments show that existing MLLMs perform poorly on these tasks, while MuseAgent achieves substantial improvements, highlighting the importance of structured multimodal grounding for interactive music understanding.

Lightweight Self-Supervised Detection of Fundamental Frequency and Accurate Probability of Voicing in Monophonic Music

Reliable fundamental frequency (F 0) and voicing estimation is essential for neural synthesis, yet many pitch extractors depend on large labeled corpora and degrade under realistic recording artifacts. We propose a lightweight, fully self-supervised framework for joint F 0 estimation and voicing inference, designed for rapid single-instrument training from limited audio. Using transposition-equivariant learning on CQT features, we introduce an EM-style iterative reweighting scheme that uses Shift Cross-Entropy (SCE) consistency as a reliability signal to suppress uninformative noisy/unvoiced frames. The resulting weights provide confidence scores that enable pseudo-labeling for a separate lightweight voicing classifier without manual annotations. Trained on MedleyDB and evaluated on MDB-stem-synth ground truth, our method achieves competitive cross-corpus performance (RPA 95.84, RCA 96.24) and demonstrates cross-instrument generalization.

Scalable Music Cover Retrieval Using Lyrics-Aligned Audio Embeddings

Music Cover Retrieval, also known as Version Identification, aims to recognize distinct renditions of the same underlying musical work, a task central to catalog management, copyright enforcement, and music retrieval. State-of-the-art approaches have largely focused on harmonic and melodic features, employing increasingly complex audio pipelines designed to be invariant to musical attributes that often vary widely across covers. While effective, these methods demand substantial training time and computational resources. By contrast, lyrics constitute a strong invariant across covers, though their use has been limited by the difficulty of extracting them accurately and efficiently from polyphonic audio. Early methods relied on simple frameworks that limited downstream performance, while more recent systems deliver stronger results but require large models integrated within complex multimodal architectures. We introduce LIVI (Lyrics-Informed Version Identification), an approach that seeks to balance retrieval accuracy with computational efficiency. First, LIVI leverages supervision from state-of-the-art transcription and text embedding models during training to achieve retrieval accuracy on par with--or superior to--harmonic-based systems. Second, LIVI remains lightweight and efficient by removing the transcription step at inference, challenging the dominance of complexity-heavy pipelines.

SLAM-LLM: A Modular, Open-Source Multimodal Large Language Model Framework and Best Practice for Speech, Language, Audio and Music Processing

The recent surge in open-source Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) frameworks, such as LLaVA, provides a convenient kickoff for artificial intelligence developers and researchers. However, most of the MLLM frameworks take vision as the main input modality, and provide limited in-depth support for the modality of speech, audio, and music. This situation hinders the development of audio-language models, and forces researchers to spend a lot of effort on code writing and hyperparameter tuning. We present SLAM-LLM, an open-source deep learning framework designed to train customized MLLMs, focused on speech, language, audio, and music processing. SLAM-LLM provides a modular configuration of different encoders, projectors, LLMs, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning plugins. SLAM-LLM also includes detailed training and inference recipes for mainstream tasks, along with high-performance checkpoints like LLM-based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Automated Audio Captioning (AAC), and Music Captioning (MC). Some of these recipes have already reached or are nearing state-of-the-art performance, and some relevant techniques have also been accepted by academic papers. We hope SLAM-LLM will accelerate iteration, development, data engineering, and model training for researchers. We are committed to continually pushing forward audio-based MLLMs through this open-source framework, and call on the community to contribute to the LLM-based speech, audio and music processing.

Weakly Supervised Tabla Stroke Transcription via TI-SDRM: A Rhythm-Aware Lattice Rescoring Framework

Tabla Stroke Transcription (TST) is central to the analysis of rhythmic structure in Hindustani classical music, yet remains challenging due to complex rhythmic organization and the scarcity of strongly annotated data. Existing approaches largely rely on fully supervised learning with onset-level annotations, which are costly and impractical at scale. This work addresses TST in a weakly supervised setting, using only symbolic stroke sequences without temporal alignment. We propose a framework that combines a CTC-based acoustic model with sequence-level rhythmic rescoring. The acoustic model produces a decoding lattice, which is refined using a \textbf{$T\bar{a}la$}-Independent Static--Dynamic Rhythmic Model (TI-SDRM) that integrates long-term rhythmic structure with short-term adaptive dynamics through an adaptive interpolation mechanism. We curate a new real-world tabla solo dataset and a complementary synthetic dataset, establishing the first benchmark for weakly supervised TST in Hindustani classical music. Experiments demonstrate consistent and substantial reductions in stroke error rate over acoustic-only decoding, confirming the importance of explicit rhythmic structure for accurate transcription.

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).

Heterogeneous computing platform for real-time robotics

After Industry 4.0 has embraced tight integration between machinery (OT), software (IT), and the Internet, creating a web of sensors, data, and algorithms in service of efficient and reliable production, a new concept of Society 5.0 is emerging, in which infrastructure of a city will be instrumented to increase reliability, efficiency, and safety. Robotics will play a pivotal role in enabling this vision that is pioneered by the NEOM initiative - a smart city, co-inhabited by humans and robots. In this paper we explore the computing platform that will be required to enable this vision. We show how we can combine neuromorphic computing hardware, exemplified by the Loihi2 processor used in conjunction with event-based cameras, for sensing and real-time perception and interaction with a local AI compute cluster (GPUs) for high-level language processing, cognition, and task planning. We demonstrate the use of this hybrid computing architecture in an interactive task, in which a humanoid robot plays a musical instrument with a human. Central to our design is the efficient and seamless integration of disparate components, ensuring that the synergy between software and hardware maximizes overall performance and responsiveness. Our proposed system architecture underscores the potential of heterogeneous computing architectures in advancing robotic autonomy and interactive intelligence, pointing toward a future where such integrated systems become the norm in complex, real-time applications.