Efficient Optimization of Hierarchical Identifiers for Generative Recommendation

SEATER is a generative retrieval model that improves recommendation inference efficiency and retrieval quality by utilizing balanced tree-structured item identifiers and contrastive training objectives. We reproduce and validate SEATER's reported improvements in retrieval quality over strong baselines across all datasets from the original work, and extend the evaluation to Yambda, a large-scale music recommendation dataset. Our experiments verify SEATER's strong performance, but show that its tree construction step during training becomes a major bottleneck as the number of items grows. To address this, we implement and evaluate two alternative construction algorithms: a greedy method optimized for minimal build time, and a hybrid method that combines greedy clustering at high levels with more precise grouping at lower levels. The greedy method reduces tree construction time to less than 2% of the original with only a minor drop in quality on the dataset with the largest item collection. The hybrid method achieves retrieval quality on par with the original, and even improves on the largest dataset, while cutting construction time to just 5-8%. All data and code are publicly available for full reproducibility at https://github.com/joshrosie/re-seater.

VABench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Audio-Video Generation

Recent advances in video generation have been remarkable, enabling models to produce visually compelling videos with synchronized audio. While existing video generation benchmarks provide comprehensive metrics for visual quality, they lack convincing evaluations for audio-video generation, especially for models aiming to generate synchronized audio-video outputs. To address this gap, we introduce VABench, a comprehensive and multi-dimensional benchmark framework designed to systematically evaluate the capabilities of synchronous audio-video generation. VABench encompasses three primary task types: text-to-audio-video (T2AV), image-to-audio-video (I2AV), and stereo audio-video generation. It further establishes two major evaluation modules covering 15 dimensions. These dimensions specifically assess pairwise similarities (text-video, text-audio, video-audio), audio-video synchronization, lip-speech consistency, and carefully curated audio and video question-answering (QA) pairs, among others. Furthermore, VABench covers seven major content categories: animals, human sounds, music, environmental sounds, synchronous physical sounds, complex scenes, and virtual worlds. We provide a systematic analysis and visualization of the evaluation results, aiming to establish a new standard for assessing video generation models with synchronous audio capabilities and to promote the comprehensive advancement of the field.

Memo2496: Expert-Annotated Dataset and Dual-View Adaptive Framework for Music Emotion Recognition

Music Emotion Recogniser (MER) research faces challenges due to limited high-quality annotated datasets and difficulties in addressing cross-track feature drift. This work presents two primary contributions to address these issues. Memo2496, a large-scale dataset, offers 2496 instrumental music tracks with continuous valence arousal labels, annotated by 30 certified music specialists. Annotation quality is ensured through calibration with extreme emotion exemplars and a consistency threshold of 0.25, measured by Euclidean distance in the valence arousal space. Furthermore, the Dual-view Adaptive Music Emotion Recogniser (DAMER) is introduced. DAMER integrates three synergistic modules: Dual Stream Attention Fusion (DSAF) facilitates token-level bidirectional interaction between Mel spectrograms and cochleagrams via cross attention mechanisms; Progressive Confidence Labelling (PCL) generates reliable pseudo labels employing curriculum-based temperature scheduling and consistency quantification using Jensen Shannon divergence; and Style Anchored Memory Learning (SAML) maintains a contrastive memory queue to mitigate cross-track feature drift. Extensive experiments on the Memo2496, 1000songs, and PMEmo datasets demonstrate DAMER's state-of-the-art performance, improving arousal dimension accuracy by 3.43%, 2.25%, and 0.17%, respectively. Ablation studies and visualisation analyses validate each module's contribution. Both the dataset and source code are publicly available.

Twenty-Five Years of MIR Research: Achievements, Practices, Evaluations, and Future Challenges

In this paper, we trace the evolution of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) over the past 25 years. While MIR gathers all kinds of research related to music informatics, a large part of it focuses on signal processing techniques for music data, fostering a close relationship with the IEEE Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Commitee. In this paper, we reflect the main research achievements of MIR along the three EDICS related to music analysis, processing and generation. We then review a set of successful practices that fuel the rapid development of MIR research. One practice is the annual research benchmark, the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange, where participants compete on a set of research tasks. Another practice is the pursuit of reproducible and open research. The active engagement with industry research and products is another key factor for achieving large societal impacts and motivating younger generations of students to join the field. Last but not the least, the commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion ensures MIR to be a vibrant and open community where various ideas, methodologies, and career pathways collide. We finish by providing future challenges MIR will have to face.

Learning Robot Manipulation from Audio World Models

World models have demonstrated impressive performance on robotic learning tasks. Many such tasks inherently demand multimodal reasoning; for example, filling a bottle with water will lead to visual information alone being ambiguous or incomplete, thereby requiring reasoning over the temporal evolution of audio, accounting for its underlying physical properties and pitch patterns. In this paper, we propose a generative latent flow matching model to anticipate future audio observations, enabling the system to reason about long-term consequences when integrated into a robot policy. We demonstrate the superior capabilities of our system through two manipulation tasks that require perceiving in-the-wild audio or music signals, compared to methods without future lookahead. We further emphasize that successful robot action learning for these tasks relies not merely on multi-modal input, but critically on the accurate prediction of future audio states that embody intrinsic rhythmic patterns.

AI as intermediary in modern-day ritual: An immersive, interactive production of the roller disco musical Xanadu at UCLA

Interfaces for contemporary large language, generative media, and perception AI models are often engineered for single user interaction. We investigate ritual as a design scaffold for developing collaborative, multi-user human-AI engagement. We consider the specific case of an immersive staging of the musical Xanadu performed at UCLA in Spring 2025. During a two-week run, over five hundred audience members contributed sketches and jazzercise moves that vision language models translated to virtual scenery elements and from choreographic prompts. This paper discusses four facets of interaction-as-ritual within the show: audience input as offerings that AI transforms into components of the ritual; performers as ritual guides, demonstrating how to interact with technology and sorting audience members into cohorts; AI systems as instruments "played" by the humans, in which sensing, generative components, and stagecraft create systems that can be mastered over time; and reciprocity of interaction, in which the show's AI machinery guides human behavior as well as being guided by humans, completing a human-AI feedback loop that visibly reshapes the virtual world. Ritual served as a frame for integrating linear narrative, character identity, music and interaction. The production explored how AI systems can support group creativity and play, addressing a critical gap in prevailing single user AI design paradigms.

Music Flamingo: Scaling Music Understanding in Audio Language Models

We introduce Music Flamingo, a novel large audio-language model designed to advance music (including song) understanding in foundational audio models. While audio-language research has progressed rapidly, music remains challenging due to its dynamic, layered, and information-dense nature. Progress has been further limited by the difficulty of scaling open audio understanding models, primarily because of the scarcity of high-quality music data and annotations. As a result, prior models are restricted to producing short, high-level captions, answering only surface-level questions, and showing limited generalization across diverse musical cultures. To address these challenges, we curate MF-Skills, a large-scale dataset labeled through a multi-stage pipeline that yields rich captions and question-answer pairs covering harmony, structure, timbre, lyrics, and cultural context. We fine-tune an enhanced Audio Flamingo 3 backbone on MF-Skills and further strengthen multiple skills relevant to music understanding. To improve the model's reasoning abilities, we introduce a post-training recipe: we first cold-start with MF-Think, a novel chain-of-thought dataset grounded in music theory, followed by GRPO-based reinforcement learning with custom rewards. Music Flamingo achieves state-of-the-art results across 10+ benchmarks for music understanding and reasoning, establishing itself as a generalist and musically intelligent audio-language model. Beyond strong empirical results, Music Flamingo sets a new standard for advanced music understanding by demonstrating how models can move from surface-level recognition toward layered, human-like perception of songs. We believe this work provides both a benchmark and a foundation for the community to build the next generation of models that engage with music as meaningfully as humans do.

Artificial Intelligence Agents in Music Analysis: An Integrative Perspective Based on Two Use Cases

This paper presents an integrative review and experimental validation of artificial intelligence (AI) agents applied to music analysis and education. We synthesize the historical evolution from rule-based models to contemporary approaches involving deep learning, multi-agent architectures, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks. The pedagogical implications are evaluated through a dual-case methodology: (1) the use of generative AI platforms in secondary education to foster analytical and creative skills; (2) the design of a multiagent system for symbolic music analysis, enabling modular, scalable, and explainable workflows. Experimental results demonstrate that AI agents effectively enhance musical pattern recognition, compositional parameterization, and educational feedback, outperforming traditional automated methods in terms of interpretability and adaptability. The findings highlight key challenges concerning transparency, cultural bias, and the definition of hybrid evaluation metrics, emphasizing the need for responsible deployment of AI in educational environments. This research contributes to a unified framework that bridges technical, pedagogical, and ethical considerations, offering evidence-based guidance for the design and application of intelligent agents in computational musicology and music education.

Preference-Based Learning in Audio Applications: A Systematic Analysis

Despite the parallel challenges that audio and text domains face in evaluating generative model outputs, preference learning remains remarkably underexplored in audio applications. Through a PRISMA-guided systematic review of approximately 500 papers, we find that only 30 (6%) apply preference learning to audio tasks. Our analysis reveals a field in transition: pre-2021 works focused on emotion recognition using traditional ranking methods (rankSVM), while post-2021 studies have pivoted toward generation tasks employing modern RLHF frameworks. We identify three critical patterns: (1) the emergence of multi-dimensional evaluation strategies combining synthetic, automated, and human preferences; (2) inconsistent alignment between traditional metrics (WER, PESQ) and human judgments across different contexts; and (3) convergence on multi-stage training pipelines that combine reward signals. Our findings suggest that while preference learning shows promise for audio, particularly in capturing subjective qualities like naturalness and musicality, the field requires standardized benchmarks, higher-quality datasets, and systematic investigation of how temporal factors unique to audio impact preference learning frameworks.

FoleyBench: A Benchmark For Video-to-Audio Models

Video-to-audio generation (V2A) is of increasing importance in domains such as film post-production, AR/VR, and sound design, particularly for the creation of Foley sound effects synchronized with on-screen actions. Foley requires generating audio that is both semantically aligned with visible events and temporally aligned with their timing. Yet, there is a mismatch between evaluation and downstream applications due to the absence of a benchmark tailored to Foley-style scenarios. We find that 74% of videos from past evaluation datasets have poor audio-visual correspondence. Moreover, they are dominated by speech and music, domains that lie outside the use case for Foley. To address this gap, we introduce FoleyBench, the first large-scale benchmark explicitly designed for Foley-style V2A evaluation. FoleyBench contains 5,000 (video, ground-truth audio, text caption) triplets, each featuring visible sound sources with audio causally tied to on-screen events. The dataset is built using an automated, scalable pipeline applied to in-the-wild internet videos from YouTube-based and Vimeo-based sources. Compared to past datasets, we show that videos from FoleyBench have stronger coverage of sound categories from a taxonomy specifically designed for Foley sound. Each clip is further labeled with metadata capturing source complexity, UCS/AudioSet category, and video length, enabling fine-grained analysis of model performance and failure modes. We benchmark several state-of-the-art V2A models, evaluating them on audio quality, audio-video alignment, temporal synchronization, and audio-text consistency. Samples are available at: https://gclef-cmu.org/foleybench