This episode of Neural Notes discusses a new AAAI paper by Dorien Herremans and Abhinaba Roy which tackles the persistent challenge in generative music AI: why systems, despite achieving high technical fidelity, often fail to produce music that is aesthetically pleasing and emotionally resonant to human listeners. Traditional training methods optimize for likelihood, successfully capturing surface-level patterns but failing to grasp the deeper qualities that drive human musical appreciation. We explore how researchers are bridging this fundamental gap between computational optimization and human preference through systematic alignment techniques. This includes detailed discussions of large-scale preference learning (e.g., MusicRL), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) integrated into modern diffusion architectures (e.g., DiffRhythm+), and inference-time optimization strategies (e.g., Text2midi-InferAlign), all focused on shifting the generative modeling objective from statistical fidelity to human-centered quality optimization.

Paper discussed:

Aligning Generative Music AI with Human Preferences: Methods and Challenges by Dorien Herremans, Abhinaba Roy. Accepted for presentation in the senior member track of AAAI 2026, Singapore.

Read the paper here.