Anchored Cyclic Generation: A Novel Paradigm for Long-Sequence Symbolic Music Generation

Generating long sequences with structural coherence remains a fundamental challenge for autoregressive models across sequential generation tasks. In symbolic music generation, this challenge is particularly pronounced, as existing methods are constrained by the inherent severe error accumulation problem of autoregressive models, leading to poor performance in music quality and structural integrity. In this paper, we propose the Anchored Cyclic Generation (ACG) paradigm, which relies on anchor features from already identified music to guide subsequent generation during the autoregressive process, effectively mitigating error accumulation in autoregressive methods. Based on the ACG paradigm, we further propose the Hierarchical Anchored Cyclic Generation (Hi-ACG) framework, which employs a systematic global-to-local generation strategy and is highly compatible with our specifically designed piano token, an efficient musical representation. The experimental results demonstrate that compared to traditional autoregressive models, the ACG paradigm achieves reduces cosine distance by an average of 34.7% between predicted feature vectors and ground-truth semantic vectors. In long-sequence symbolic music generation tasks, the Hi-ACG framework significantly outperforms existing mainstream methods in both subjective and objective evaluations. Furthermore, the framework exhibits excellent task generalization capabilities, achieving superior performance in related tasks such as music completion.

Audio-Omni: Extending Multi-modal Understanding to Versatile Audio Generation and Editing

Recent progress in multimodal models has spurred rapid advances in audio understanding, generation, and editing. However, these capabilities are typically addressed by specialized models, leaving the development of a truly unified framework that can seamlessly integrate all three tasks underexplored. While some pioneering works have explored unifying audio understanding and generation, they often remain confined to specific domains. To address this, we introduce Audio-Omni, the first end-to-end framework to unify generation and editing across general sound, music, and speech domains, with integrated multi-modal understanding capabilities. Our architecture synergizes a frozen Multimodal Large Language Model for high-level reasoning with a trainable Diffusion Transformer for high-fidelity synthesis. To overcome the critical data scarcity in audio editing, we construct AudioEdit, a new large-scale dataset comprising over one million meticulously curated editing pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Audio-Omni achieves state-of-the-art performance across a suite of benchmarks, outperforming prior unified approaches while achieving performance on par with or superior to specialized expert models. Beyond its core capabilities, Audio-Omni exhibits remarkable inherited capabilities, including knowledge-augmented reasoning generation, in-context generation, and zero-shot cross-lingual control for audio generation, highlighting a promising direction toward universal generative audio intelligence. The code, model, and dataset will be publicly released on https://zeyuet.github.io/Audio-Omni.

Discrete Token Modeling for Multi-Stem Music Source Separation with Language Models

We propose a generative framework for multi-track music source separation (MSS) that reformulates the task as conditional discrete token generation. Unlike conventional approaches that directly estimate continuous signals in the time or frequency domain, our method combines a Conformer-based conditional encoder, a dual-path neural audio codec (HCodec), and a decoder-only language model to autoregressively generate audio tokens for four target tracks. The generated tokens are decoded back to waveforms through the codec decoder. Evaluation on the MUSDB18-HQ benchmark shows that our generative approach achieves perceptual quality approaching state-of-the-art discriminative methods, while attaining the highest NISQA score on the vocals track. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the learnable Conformer encoder and the benefit of sequential cross-track generation.

Towards Real-Time Human-AI Musical Co-Performance: Accompaniment Generation with Latent Diffusion Models and MAX/MSP

We present a framework for real-time human-AI musical co-performance, in which a latent diffusion model generates instrumental accompaniment in response to a live stream of context audio. The system combines a MAX/MSP front-end-handling real-time audio input, buffering, and playback-with a Python inference server running the generative model, communicating via OSC/UDP messages. This allows musicians to perform in MAX/MSP - a well-established, real-time capable environment - while interacting with a large-scale Python-based generative model, overcoming the fundamental disconnect between real-time music tools and state-of-the-art AI models. We formulate accompaniment generation as a sliding-window look-ahead protocol, training the model to predict future audio from partial context, where system latency is a critical constraint. To reduce latency, we apply consistency distillation to our diffusion model, achieving a 5.4x reduction in sampling time, with both models achieving real-time operation. Evaluated on musical coherence, beat alignment, and audio quality, both models achieve strong performance in the Retrospective regime and degrade gracefully as look-ahead increases. These results demonstrate the feasibility of diffusion-based real-time accompaniment and expose the fundamental trade-off between model latency, look-ahead depth, and generation quality that any such system must navigate.

VidAudio-Bench: Benchmarking V2A and VT2A Generation across Four Audio Categories

Video-to-Audio (V2A) generation is essential for immersive multimedia experiences, yet its evaluation remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks typically assess diverse audio types under a unified protocol, overlooking the fine-grained requirements of distinct audio categories. To address this gap, we propose VidAudio-Bench, a multi-task benchmark for V2A evaluation with four key features: (1) Broad Coverage: It encompasses four representative audio categories - sound effects, music, speech, and singing - under both V2A and Video-Text-to-Audio (VT2A) settings. (2) Extensive Evaluation: It comprises 1,634 video-text pairs and benchmarks 11 state-of-the-art generation models. (3) Comprehensive Metrics: It introduces 13 task-specific, reference-free metrics to systematically assess audio quality, video-audio consistency, and text-audio consistency. (4) Human Alignment: It validates all metrics through subjective studies, demonstrating strong consistency with human preferences. Experimental results reveal that current V2A models perform poorly in speech and singing compared to sound effects. Our VT2A results further highlight a fundamental tension between instruction following and visually grounded generation: stronger visual conditioning improves video-audio alignment, but often at the cost of generating the intended audio category. These findings establish VidAudio-Bench as a comprehensive and scalable framework for diagnosing V2A systems and provide new insights into multimodal audio generation.

Composer Vector: Style-steering Symbolic Music Generation in a Latent Space

Symbolic music generation has made significant progress, yet achieving fine-grained and flexible control over composer style remains challenging. Existing training-based methods for composer style conditioning depend on large labeled datasets. Besides, these methods typically support only single-composer generation at a time, limiting their applicability to more creative or blended scenarios. In this work, we propose Composer Vector, an inference-time steering method that operates directly in the model's latent space to control composer style without retraining. Through experiments on multiple symbolic music generation models, we show that Composer Vector effectively guides generations toward target composer styles, enabling smooth and interpretable control through a continuous steering coefficient. It also enables seamless fusion of multiple styles within a unified latent space framework. Overall, our work demonstrates that simple latent space steering provides a practical and general mechanism for controllable symbolic music generation, enabling more flexible and interactive creative workflows. Code and Demo are available here: https://github.com/JiangXunyi/Composer-Vector and https://jiangxunyi.github.io/composervector.github.io/

Multimodal Large Language Models for Multi-Subject In-Context Image Generation

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have enabled visually coherent image synthesis from descriptions, but generating images containing multiple given subjects remains challenging. As the number of reference identities increases, existing methods often suffer from subject missing and semantic drift. To address this problem, we propose MUSIC, the first MLLM specifically designed for \textbf{MU}lti-\textbf{S}ubject \textbf{I}n-\textbf{C}ontext image generation. To overcome the data scarcity, we introduce an automatic and scalable data generation pipeline that eliminates the need for manual annotation. Furthermore, we enhance the model's understanding of multi-subject semantic relationships through a vision chain-of-thought (CoT) mechanism, guiding step-by-step reasoning from subject images to semantics and generation. To mitigate identity entanglement and manage visual complexity, we develop a novel semantics-driven spatial layout planning method and demonstrate its test-time scalability. By incorporating complex subject images during training, we improve the model's capacity for chained reasoning. In addition, we curate MSIC, a new benchmark tailored for multi-subject in-context generation. Experimental results demonstrate that MUSIC significantly surpasses other methods in both multi- and single-subject scenarios.

Hidden Biases in Conditioning Autoregressive Models

Large language and music models are increasingly used for constrained generation: rhyming lines, fixed meter, inpainting or infilling, positional endings, and other global form requirements. These systems often perform strikingly well, but the induced procedures are usually not exact conditioning of the underlying autoregressive model. This creates a hidden inferential bias, distinct from the better-known notion of bias inherited from the training set: samples are distorted relative to the true constrained distribution, with no generic guarantee of complete coverage of the admissible solution space or of correct conditional probabilities over valid completions. We formalize several exact inference tasks for autoregressive models and prove corresponding hardness results. For succinctly represented autoregressive models whose next-token probabilities are computable in polynomial time, exact sentence-level maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding is NP-hard. This hardness persists under unary and metrical constraints. On the sampling side, exact conditioned normalization is \#P-hard even for regular constraints such as fixed-length terminal events. Unlike finite-state Markov models, general autoregressive models do not admit a bounded-state dynamic program for these tasks. These results formalize a standard claim in the neural decoding literature: local autoregressive sampling is easy, whereas exact decoding and exact conditioning under global form constraints are computationally intractable in general.

AT-ADD: All-Type Audio Deepfake Detection Challenge Evaluation Plan

The rapid advancement of Audio Large Language Models (ALLMs) has enabled cost-effective, high-fidelity generation and manipulation of both speech and non-speech audio, including sound effects, singing voices, and music. While these capabilities foster creativity and content production, they also introduce significant security and trust challenges, as realistic audio deepfakes can now be generated and disseminated at scale. Existing audio deepfake detection (ADD) countermeasures (CMs) and benchmarks, however, remain largely speech-centric, often relying on speech-specific artifacts and exhibiting limited robustness to real-world distortions, as well as restricted generalization to heterogeneous audio types and emerging spoofing techniques. To address these gaps, we propose the All-Type Audio Deepfake Detection (AT-ADD) Grand Challenge for ACM Multimedia 2026, designed to bridge controlled academic evaluation with practical multimedia forensics. AT-ADD comprises two tracks: (1) Robust Speech Deepfake Detection, which evaluates detectors under real-world scenarios and against unseen, state-of-the-art speech generation methods; and (2) All-Type Audio Deepfake Detection, which extends detection beyond speech to diverse, unknown audio types and promotes type-agnostic generalization across speech, sound, singing, and music. By providing standardized datasets, rigorous evaluation protocols, and reproducible baselines, AT-ADD aims to accelerate the development of robust and generalizable audio forensic technologies, supporting secure communication, reliable media verification, and responsible governance in an era of pervasive synthetic audio.

Yes, But Not Always. Generative AI Needs Nuanced Opt-in

This paper argues that a one-size-fits-all approach to specifying consent for the use of creative works in generative AI is insufficient. Real-world ownership and rights holder structures, the imitation of artistic styles and likeness, and the limitless contexts of use of AI outputs make the status quo of binary consent with opt-in by default untenable. To move beyond the current impasse, we consider levers of control in generative AI workflows at training, inference, and dissemination. Based on these insights, we position inference-time opt-in as an overlooked opportunity for nuanced consent verification. We conceptualize nuanced consent conditions for opt-in and propose an agent-based inference-time opt-in architecture to verify if user intent requests meet conditional consent granted by rights holders. In a case study for music, we demonstrate that nuanced opt-in at inference can account for established rights and re-establish a balance of power between rights holders and AI developers.