@conference {2026,
	title = {JAM: A Tiny Flow-based Song Generator with Fine-grained Controllability and Aesthetic Alignment},
	booktitle = {Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)},
	year = {2026},
	address = {Budapest, Hungary},
	abstract = {Diffusion and flow-matching models have revolutionized automatic text-to-audio generation, increasingly capable of generating high-quality audio outputs for speech and acoustic events. However, creative audio generation involving music and songs still has room for improvement. Recent open lyrics-to-song models like DiffRhythm, ACE-Step, and LeVo have set an acceptable standard for recreational use but lack the fine-grained word-level controllability desired by musicians. To our knowledge, our flow-matching-based JAM is the first to provide word-level timing and duration control in song generation, enabling fine-grained vocal control. To better align generated songs with human preferences, we implement aesthetic alignment through Direct Preference Optimization, iteratively refining the model using a synthetic dataset without manual annotations. Additionally, we aim to standardize evaluation of lyrics-to-song models through our public evaluation dataset JAME. We demonstrate that JAM outperforms open models on music-specific attributes.},
	url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=3i1qFuRTYV},
	author = {R. Liu and C.Y. Hung and N. Majumder and D. Herremans and S. Poria}
}
@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 {2022,
	title = {Jointist: Joint Learning for Multi-instrument Transcription and Its Applications},
	year = {2022},
	publisher = {Arxiv},
	organization = {Arxiv},
	abstract = {In this paper, we introduce Jointist, an instrument-aware multi-instrument framework that is capable of transcribing, recognizing, and separating multiple musical instruments from an audio clip. Jointist consists of the instrument recognition module that conditions the other modules: the transcription module that outputs instrument-specific piano rolls, and the source separation module that utilizes instrument information and transcription results.
The instrument conditioning is designed for an explicit multi-instrument functionality while the connection between the transcription and source separation modules is for better transcription performance. Our challenging problem formulation makes the model highly useful in the real world given that modern popular music typically consists of multiple instruments. However, its novelty necessitates a new perspective on how to evaluate such a model. During the experiment, we assess the model from various aspects, providing a new evaluation perspective for multi-instrument transcription. We also argue that transcription models can be utilized as a preprocessing module for other music analysis tasks. In the experiment on several downstream tasks, the symbolic representation provided by our transcription model turned out to be helpful to spectrograms in solving downbeat detection, chord recognition, and key estimation.},
	doi = { https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2206.10805},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.10805},
	author = {K.W. Cheuk and K. Choi and Q. Kong and B. Li and M. Won and A. Hung and J.-C. Wang and D. Herremans}
}
