2026

ISMIR
MPEcho: A Melody and Phoneme-Aware Generative Framework for Controllable Cover Song Generation

Wei-Jaw Lee, Hsuan-Yu Yeh, Ting-Yi Hu, Chih-Pin Tan, Fang-Duo Tsai, Yi-Hsuan Yang

International Society for Music Information Retrieval 2026

Cover song generation (CSG) should preserve the melodic and linguistic content of a reference song while recreating the remaining musical components. The state-of-the-art model SongEcho utilizes F0 sequences and voiced/unvoiced (V/UV) tags for conditioning; however, implicit linguistic information from V/UV tags cannot guarantee lyric accuracy, leading to a high phoneme error rate (PER). Inspired by singing voice synthesis (SVS), we propose MPEcho, which integrates a phoneme encoder and a length regulator (LR) into the SongEcho framework. By providing explicit phoneme-level conditioning and precise temporal boundaries, MPEcho significantly reduces PER. To enable this, we developed Phonsa, a Whisper-based automatic transcription model that provides high precision phoneme-level annotations for singing voices, overcoming the scarcity of high-quality audio-phoneme pairs. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of Phonsa for alignment and MPEcho for end-to-end CSG.

ISMIR
MPEcho: A Melody and Phoneme-Aware Generative Framework for Controllable Cover Song Generation

Wei-Jaw Lee, Hsuan-Yu Yeh, Ting-Yi Hu, Chih-Pin Tan, Fang-Duo Tsai, Yi-Hsuan Yang

International Society for Music Information Retrieval 2026

Cover song generation (CSG) should preserve the melodic and linguistic content of a reference song while recreating the remaining musical components. The state-of-the-art model SongEcho utilizes F0 sequences and voiced/unvoiced (V/UV) tags for conditioning; however, implicit linguistic information from V/UV tags cannot guarantee lyric accuracy, leading to a high phoneme error rate (PER). Inspired by singing voice synthesis (SVS), we propose MPEcho, which integrates a phoneme encoder and a length regulator (LR) into the SongEcho framework. By providing explicit phoneme-level conditioning and precise temporal boundaries, MPEcho significantly reduces PER. To enable this, we developed Phonsa, a Whisper-based automatic transcription model that provides high precision phoneme-level annotations for singing voices, overcoming the scarcity of high-quality audio-phoneme pairs. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of Phonsa for alignment and MPEcho for end-to-end CSG.

ICME-GC
Academic Text-to-Music Grand Challenge: Datasets, Baselines, and Evaluation Methods

Fang-Chih Hsieh, Wei-Jaw Lee, Chun-Ping Wang, Hung-yi Lee, Hao-Wen Dong, Yi-Hsuan Yang

IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo - Grand Challenge 2026

We establishes a fair-play benchmark that requires participants to train generative models strictly from scratch using a standardized, CC-licensed subset of the MTG-Jamendo dataset containing only instrumental music. The challenge is divided into two tracks: the Efficiency Track (limited to 500M parameters) and the Performance Track (no parameter limit). Submissions are evaluated through a multi-stage process (FAD, CLAP, CCS, MOS). By providing open-source baselines, preprocessing pipelines, reference captions, and public evaluation code for computing FAD and CLAP, this challenge aims to facilitate and promote TTM research in academic contexts.

ICME-GC
Academic Text-to-Music Grand Challenge: Datasets, Baselines, and Evaluation Methods

Fang-Chih Hsieh, Wei-Jaw Lee, Chun-Ping Wang, Hung-yi Lee, Hao-Wen Dong, Yi-Hsuan Yang

IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo - Grand Challenge 2026

We establishes a fair-play benchmark that requires participants to train generative models strictly from scratch using a standardized, CC-licensed subset of the MTG-Jamendo dataset containing only instrumental music. The challenge is divided into two tracks: the Efficiency Track (limited to 500M parameters) and the Performance Track (no parameter limit). Submissions are evaluated through a multi-stage process (FAD, CLAP, CCS, MOS). By providing open-source baselines, preprocessing pipelines, reference captions, and public evaluation code for computing FAD and CLAP, this challenge aims to facilitate and promote TTM research in academic contexts.

Arxiv
Training-Efficient Text-to-Music Generation with State-Space Modeling

Wei-Jaw Lee, Fang-Chih Hsieh, Xuanjun Chen, Fang-Duo Tsai, Yi-Hsuan Yang

Under review 2026

We propose a hybrid Auto-Regressive (AR) and Non-Auto-Regressive (NAR) architecture for coarse-to-fine music generation. Our approach employs a State-Space Model (SSM) as the language model to generate coarse tokens, followed by a pre-trained diffusion model for fine-grained refinement. By leveraging the linear scaling of SSMs, our model achieves significantly higher training efficiency compared to traditional Transformer-based architectures.

Arxiv
Training-Efficient Text-to-Music Generation with State-Space Modeling

Wei-Jaw Lee, Fang-Chih Hsieh, Xuanjun Chen, Fang-Duo Tsai, Yi-Hsuan Yang

Under review 2026

We propose a hybrid Auto-Regressive (AR) and Non-Auto-Regressive (NAR) architecture for coarse-to-fine music generation. Our approach employs a State-Space Model (SSM) as the language model to generate coarse tokens, followed by a pre-trained diffusion model for fine-grained refinement. By leveraging the linear scaling of SSMs, our model achieves significantly higher training efficiency compared to traditional Transformer-based architectures.

2025

ISMIR LBD
Exploring State-Space-Model Based Language Model in Music Generation

Wei-Jaw Lee, Fang-Chih Hsieh, Xuanjun Chen, Fang-Duo Tsai, Yi-Hsuan Yang

International Society for Music Information Retrieval, Late Breaking Demo 2025

We investigates the potential of Mamba-based State Space Models (SSMs) as an efficient alternative to Transformers for text-to-music generation. By adopting a single-layer codebook representation and adapting the SiMBA architecture into a decoder, the proposed model achieves significantly faster convergence and produces outputs closer to the ground truth under limited-resource settings. The findings demonstrate that SSMs offer a promising path for developing efficient and expressive music language models that maintain high performance with lower computational overhead.

ISMIR LBD
Exploring State-Space-Model Based Language Model in Music Generation

Wei-Jaw Lee, Fang-Chih Hsieh, Xuanjun Chen, Fang-Duo Tsai, Yi-Hsuan Yang

International Society for Music Information Retrieval, Late Breaking Demo 2025

We investigates the potential of Mamba-based State Space Models (SSMs) as an efficient alternative to Transformers for text-to-music generation. By adopting a single-layer codebook representation and adapting the SiMBA architecture into a decoder, the proposed model achieves significantly faster convergence and produces outputs closer to the ground truth under limited-resource settings. The findings demonstrate that SSMs offer a promising path for developing efficient and expressive music language models that maintain high performance with lower computational overhead.

ICML
MuseControlLite: Multifunctional Music Generation with Lightweight Conditioners

Fang-Duo Tsai, Shih-Lun Wu, Wei-Jaw Lee, Sheng-Ping Yang, Bo-Rui Chen, Hao-Chung Cheng, Yi-Hsuan Yang

International Conference on Machine Learning 2025

We propose MuseControlLite, a lightweight fine-tuning mechanism that uses rotary positional embeddings and decoupled cross-attention to achieve precise, time-varying control over music generation. This model achieves superior melody accuracy while requiring nearly 7 times fewer trainable parameters than state-of-the-art ControlNet-based architectures. It is the first framework to simultaneously handle musical attribute control (melody, rhythm, and dynamics) alongside reference audio for seamless inpainting and outpainting.

ICML
MuseControlLite: Multifunctional Music Generation with Lightweight Conditioners

Fang-Duo Tsai, Shih-Lun Wu, Wei-Jaw Lee, Sheng-Ping Yang, Bo-Rui Chen, Hao-Chung Cheng, Yi-Hsuan Yang

International Conference on Machine Learning 2025

We propose MuseControlLite, a lightweight fine-tuning mechanism that uses rotary positional embeddings and decoupled cross-attention to achieve precise, time-varying control over music generation. This model achieves superior melody accuracy while requiring nearly 7 times fewer trainable parameters than state-of-the-art ControlNet-based architectures. It is the first framework to simultaneously handle musical attribute control (melody, rhythm, and dynamics) alongside reference audio for seamless inpainting and outpainting.