@conference {2026,
	title = {Aligning Generative Music AI with Human Preferences: Methods and Challenges},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of AAAI, senior member track},
	year = {2026},
	publisher = {AAAI},
	organization = {AAAI},
	address = {Singapore},
	author = {D. Herremans and A. Roy}
}
@conference {2026,
	title = {Emerging AI Technologies for Music: Towards Controllable, Collaborative, and Creative Systems},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, PMLR 303:1-5, 2026},
	year = {2026},
	abstract = {The field of AI and music has witnessed rapid growth in recent years driving notable success across domains such as music information retrieval (MIR), generative modelling, representation learning, source separation, and transcription among several others. The emergence of large-scale music foundation models (e.g., MusicLM, Suno, Riffusion) and multimodal systems combining modalities such as text, audio and video has further expanded the creative possibilities of AI-driven music. However, despite these technical advances, there remains a significant gap between the capabilities of current AI music systems and their practical adoption by musicians, composers, producers, and educators. At the same time, there has been a growing consensus in the community that recognizes the limitations of fully autonomous generation and the need for interactive, interpretable, controllable, and human-centred approaches. In light of this emerging trend to maintain meaningful human agency over the creative process, the editors of this special issue organized the first workshop on Emerging AI Technologies for Music, as part of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in 2026 at Singapore.

Full proceedings: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v303/},
	author = {K. Bhandari and A. Roy and S. Colton and D. Herremans}
}
@conference {2026,
	title = {KARMA-MV: A Benchmark for Causal Question Answering on Music Videos},
	booktitle = {arXiv:2605.08175},
	year = {2026},
	abstract = {While significant progress has been made in Video Question Answering and cross-modal understanding, causal reasoning about how visual dynamics drive musical structure in music videos remains under-explored. We introduce KARMA-MV, a large-scale multiple-choice QA dataset derived from 2,682 YouTube music videos, designed to test models{\textquoteright} ability to integrate temporal audio-visual cues and reason about visual-to-musical influence across reasoning, prediction, and counterfactual questions. Unlike traditional datasets requiring manual annotation, KARMA-MV leverages LLM reasoning for scalable generation and validation, yielding 37,737 MCQs. We propose a causal knowledge graph (CKG) approach that augments vision-language models (VLMs) with structured retrieval of cross-modal dependencies. Experiments on state-of-the-art VLMs and LLMs show consistent gains from CKG grounding -- especially for smaller models -- establishing the value of explicit causal structure for music-video reasoning. KARMA-MV provides a new benchmark for advancing causal audio-visual understanding beyond correlation.},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08175},
	author = {A. Ghosh and A. Roy and D. Herremans}
}
@conference {2025,
	title = {Leveraging LLM Embeddings for Cross Dataset Label Alignment and Zero Shot Music Emotion Prediction},
	booktitle = {Conference on AI Music Creativity (AIMC)},
	year = {2026},
	address = {Berlin, Germany},
	abstract = {In this work, we present a novel method for music emotion recognition that leverages Large Language Model (LLM) embeddings for label alignment across multiple datasets and zero-shot prediction on novel categories. First, we compute LLM embeddings for emotion labels and apply non-parametric clustering to group similar labels, across multiple datasets containing disjoint labels. We use these cluster centers to map music features (MERT) to the LLM embedding space. To further enhance the model, we introduce an alignment regularization that enables dissociation of MERT embeddings from different clusters. This further enhances the model{\textquoteright}s ability to better adaptation to unseen datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by performing zero-shot inference on a new dataset, showcasing its ability to generalize to unseen labels without additional training.},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11522},
	author = {R. Liu and A. Roy and D. Herremans}
}
@conference {2025,
	title = {MelodySim: Measuring Melody-aware Music Similarity for Plagiarism Detection},
	booktitle = {IEEE Tencon},
	year = {2026},
	publisher = {IEEE},
	organization = {IEEE},
	address = {Bali, Indonesia},
	abstract = {We propose MelodySim, a melody-aware music similarity model and dataset for plagiarism detection. First, we introduce a novel method to construct a dataset focused on melodic similarity. By augmenting Slakh2100, an existing MIDI dataset, we generate variations of each piece while preserving the melody through modifications such as note splitting, arpeggiation, minor track dropout, and re-instrumentation. A user study confirms that positive pairs indeed contain similar melodies, while other musical tracks are significantly changed. Second, we develop a segment-wise melodic-similarity detection model that uses a MERT encoder and applies a triplet neural network to capture melodic similarity. The resulting decision matrix highlights where plagiarism might occur. The experiments show that our model is able to outperform baseline models in detecting similar melodic fragments on the MelodySim test set.},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20979},
	author = {T. Lu and Geist, C-M and J. Melechovsky and A. Roy and D. Herremans}
}
@proceedings {2025,
	title = {SonicMaster: Towards Controllable All-in-One Music Restoration and Mastering},
	year = {2026},
	address = {South Korea},
	abstract = {Music recordings often suffer from audio quality issues such as excessive reverberation, distortion, clipping, tonal imbalances, and a narrowed stereo image, especially when created in non-professional settings without specialized equipment or expertise. These problems are typically corrected using separate specialized tools and manual adjustments. In this paper, we introduce SonicMaster, the first unified generative model for music restoration and mastering that addresses a broad spectrum of audio artifacts with text-based control. SonicMaster is conditioned on natural language instructions to apply targeted enhancements, or can operate in an automatic mode for general restoration. To train this model, we construct the SonicMaster dataset, a large dataset of paired degraded and high-quality tracks by simulating common degradation types with nineteen degradation functions belonging to five enhancements groups: equalization, dynamics, reverb, amplitude, and stereo. Our approach leverages a flow-matching generative training paradigm to learn an audio transformation that maps degraded inputs to their cleaned, mastered versions guided by text prompts. Objective audio quality metrics demonstrate that SonicMaster significantly improves sound quality across all artifact categories. Furthermore, subjective listening tests confirm that listeners prefer SonicMaster{\textquoteright}s enhanced outputs over other baselines. The model and demo samples are available through https://github.com/AMAAI-Lab/SonicMaster.},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03448},
	author = {J. Melechovsky and A. Mehrish and A. Roy and D. Herremans}
}
@conference {2025,
	title = {Text2midi-InferAlign: Improving Symbolic Music Generation with Inference-Time Alignment},
	booktitle = {ICASSP},
	year = {2026},
	address = {Barcelona, Spain},
	abstract = {We present Text2midi-InferAlign, a novel technique for improving symbolic music generation at inference time. Our method leverages text-to-audio alignment and music structural alignment rewards during inference to encourage the generated music to be consistent with the input caption. Specifically, we introduce two objectives scores: a text-audio consistency score that measures rhythmic alignment between the generated music and the original text caption, and a harmonic consistency score that penalizes generated music containing notes inconsistent with the key. By optimizing these alignment-based objectives during the generation process, our model produces symbolic music that is more closely tied to the input captions, thereby improving the overall quality and coherence of the generated compositions. Our approach can extend any existing autoregressive model without requiring further training or fine-tuning. We evaluate our work on top of Text2midi - an existing text-to-midi generation model, demonstrating significant improvements in both objective and subjective evaluation metrics.},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12669},
	author = {A. Roy and G. Puri and D. Herremans}
}
@conference {2026,
	title = {Text2Score: Generating Sheet Music From Textual Prompts},
	booktitle = {arXiv:2605.13431},
	year = {2026},
	abstract = {Developing text-driven symbolic music generation models remains challenging due to the scarcity of aligned text-music datasets and the unreliability of automated captioning pipelines. While most efforts have focused on MIDI, sheet music representations are largely underexplored in text-driven generation. We present Text2Score, a two-stage framework comprising a planning stage and an execution stage for generating sheet music from natural language prompts. By deriving supervision signals directly from symbolic XML data, we propose an alternative training paradigm that bypasses noisy or scarce text-music pairs. In the planning stage, an LLM orchestrator translates a natural language prompt into a structured measure-wise plan defining musical attributes such as instruments, key, time signatures, harmony, etc. This plan is then consumed by a generative model in the execution stage to produce interleaved ABC notation conditioned on the plan{\textquoteright}s structural constraints. To assess output quality, we introduce an evaluation framework covering playability, readability, instrument utilization, structural complexity, and prompt adherence, validated by expert musicians. Text2Score consistently outperforms both a pure LLM-based agentic framework and three end-to-end baselines across objective and subjective dimensions. We open-source the dataset, code, evaluation set and LLM prompts used in this work; a demo is available on our project page (https://keshavbhandari.github.io/portfolio/text2score).},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13431},
	author = {K. Bhandari and S. Chang and A. Roy and F. Ronchini and E. Benetos and D. Herremans and S. Colton}
}
@conference {2025,
	title = {JamendoMaxCaps: A Large Scale Music-caption Dataset with Imputed Metadata},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of IJCNN, Rome, Italy},
	year = {2025},
	abstract = {We introduce JamendoMaxCaps, a large-scale music-caption dataset featuring over 200,000 freely licensed instrumental tracks from the renowned Jamendo platform. The dataset includes captions generated by a state-of-the-art captioning model, enhanced with imputed metadata. We also introduce a retrieval system that leverages both musical features and metadata to identify similar songs, which are then used to fill in missing metadata using a local large language model (LLLM). This approach allows us to provide a more comprehensive and informative dataset for researchers working on music-language understanding tasks. We validate this approach quantitatively with five different measurements. By making the JamendoMaxCaps dataset publicly available, we provide a high-quality resource to advance research in music-language understanding tasks such as music retrieval, multimodal representation learning, and generative music models.},
	doi = {10.1109/IJCNN64981.2025.11228034},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07461},
	author = {A. Roy and R. Liu and T. Lu and D. Herremans}
}
@conference {2025,
	title = {SonicVerse: Multi-Task Learning for Music Feature-Informed Captioning},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th Conference on AI Music Creativity (AIMC 2025), Brussels, Belgium, September 10th - 12th, 2025},
	year = {2025},
	abstract = {Detailed captions that accurately reflect the characteristics of a music piece can enrich music databases and drive forward research in music AI. This paper introduces a multi-task music captioning model, SonicVerse, that integrates caption generation with auxiliary music feature detection tasks such as key detection, vocals detection, and more, so as to directly capture both low-level acoustic details as well as high-level musical attributes. The key contribution is a projection-based architecture that transforms audio input into language tokens, while simultaneously detecting music features through dedicated auxiliary heads. The outputs of these heads are also projected into language tokens, to enhance the captioning input. This framework not only produces rich, descriptive captions for short music fragments but also directly enables the generation of detailed time-informed descriptions for longer music pieces, by chaining the outputs using a large-language model. To train the model, we extended the MusicBench dataset by annotating it with music features using MIRFLEX, a modular music feature extractor, resulting in paired audio, captions and music feature data. Experimental results show that incorporating features in this way improves the quality and detail of the generated captions.},
	keywords = {captioning, music, nlp},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15154},
	author = {A. Chopra and A. Roy and D. Herremans}
}
@article {2025,
	title = {Text2midi: Generating Symbolic Music from Captions},
	journal = {Proceedings of AAAI, Philadelphia},
	year = {2025},
	abstract = {This paper introduces text2midi, an end-to-end model to generate MIDI files from textual descriptions. Leveraging the growing popularity of multimodal generative approaches, text2midi capitalizes on the extensive availability of textual data and the success of large language models (LLMs). Our end-to-end system harnesses the power of LLMs to generate symbolic music in the form of MIDI files. Specifically, we utilize a pretrained LLM encoder to process captions, which then condition an autoregressive transformer decoder to produce MIDI sequences that accurately reflect the provided descriptions. This intuitive and user-friendly method significantly streamlines the music creation process by allowing users to generate music pieces using text prompts. We conduct comprehensive empirical evaluations, incorporating both automated and human studies, that show our model generates MIDI files of high quality that are indeed controllable by text captions that may include music theory terms such as chords, keys, and tempo. We release the code and music samples on our demo page (this https URL) for users to interact with text2midi.},
	url = {https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2412.16526},
	author = {K. Bhandari and A. Roy and K. Wang and G. Puri and S. Colton and D. Herremans}
}
@conference {2024,
	title = {MidiCaps {\textemdash} A large-scale MIDI dataset with text captions},
	booktitle = {ISMIR},
	year = {2024},
	address = {San Francisco},
	abstract = {Generative models guided by text prompts are increasingly becoming more popular. However, no text-to-MIDI models currently exist, mostly due to the lack of a captioned MIDI dataset. This work aims to enable research that combines LLMs with symbolic music by presenting the first large-scale MIDI dataset with text captions that is openly available: MidiCaps. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) files are a widely used format for encoding musical information. Their structured format captures the nuances of musical composition and has practical applications by music producers, composers, musicologists, as well as performers. Inspired by recent advancements in captioning techniques applied to various domains, we present a large-scale curated dataset of over 168k MIDI files accompanied by textual descriptions. Each MIDI caption succinctly describes the musical content, encompassing tempo, chord progression, time signature, instruments present, genre and mood; thereby facilitating multi-modal exploration and analysis. The dataset contains a mix of various genres, styles, and complexities, offering a rich source for training and evaluating models for tasks such as music information retrieval, music understanding and cross-modal translation. We provide detailed statistics about the dataset and have assessed the quality of the captions in an extensive listening study. We anticipate that this resource will stimulate further research in the intersection of music and natural language processing, fostering advancements in both fields.},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02255},
	author = {J. Melechovsky and A. Roy and D. Herremans}
}
@conference {2024,
	title = {MIRFLEX: Music Information Retrieval Feature Library for Extraction},
	booktitle = {ISMIR, Late Breaking Demos},
	year = {2024},
	address = {San Francisco},
	abstract = {This paper introduces an extendable modular system that compiles a range of music feature extraction models to aid music information retrieval research. The features include musical elements like key, downbeats, and genre, as well as audio characteristics like instrument recognition, vocals/instrumental classification, and vocals gender detection. The integrated models are state-of-the-art or latest open-source. The features can be extracted as latent or post-processed labels, enabling integration into music applications such as generative music, recommendation, and playlist generation. The modular design allows easy integration of newly developed systems, making it a good benchmarking and comparison tool. This versatile toolkit supports the research community in developing innovative solutions by providing concrete musical features.
},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00469},
	author = {A. Chopra and A. Roy and D. Herremans}
}
