Organizations: University of Tokyo, Japan · National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan
Abstract
This work investigates the effect of batch sampling strategies during training for text-to-audio music generation under low-data and small-scale model settings. This paper describes our approach and findings for the ICME 2026 Grand Challenge on Academic Text-to-Music Generation. Training data are clustered using either text embeddings or audio embeddings, and samples with similar characteristics are grouped within the same mini-batch to mitigate gradient interference. The effects of modality and cluster granularity on clustering are analyzed. Results show that clustering based on text embeddings achieves better performance on objective evaluation metrics than clustering based on audio embeddings. In addition, different cluster granularity leads to different behaviors across evaluation criteria: a moderate number of clusters performs best on objective metrics, while a larger number of clusters tends to exhibit music with more coherent structure in listening tests.
This paper presents an overview and the technical framework of the ICME 2026 Grand Challenge on Academic Text-to-Music Generation (ATTM). Despite the rapid progress in text-to-music generation (TTM) systems, the field is currently dominated by models trained on massive proprietary datasets with industrial-scale computational resources, creating a significant barrier for academic research. To address this, the ATTM Challenge 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 involving objective metrics, including Frechet Audio Distance, CLAP score, and a novel Concept Coverage Score (CCS), followed by a subjective listening test. 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.
State-of-the-art text-to-music generation systems rely on massive proprietary datasets and industrial-scale compute, making it impossible to disentangle architectural contributions from resource advantages. We propose \textit{score-aware training}, which treats audio-caption alignment score as a direct supervision signal throughout the pipeline. Rather than discarding low-scoring segments, we repurpose them via a CLAP-conditioned Beta noise timestep schedule that routes them to high-noise training regimes, acting as an effective implicit regularizer. Complementarily, segment-level filtering removes the most misaligned examples, and a two-stage caption procedure bridges the distribution gap between verbose training captions and concise inference prompts. A REPA auxiliary loss further transfers structured semantic knowledge from pretrained CLAP and MuQ encoders without additional data. Our 450M-parameter FluxAudio-based system, submitted to the ICME 2026 ATTM Grand Challenge Efficiency Track, ranked 2nd across both tracks in the objective evaluation and 3rd in the Efficiency Track in the final MOS evaluation.
We describe our entry to the efficiency track of the Academic Text-to-Music (ATTM) Grand Challenge at ICME 2026. Beyond the challenge protocol's FAD-CLAP and CLAP score, we add a learned human-preference reward from TuneJury, a twin pairwise ranker trained over open music-preference datasets. The reward serves both as a training-time conditioning signal and as a sample-selection criterion. The pipeline combines five engineering decisions on a 120M-parameter FluxAudio-S backbone, four at training time and one at inference: (i) training-time reward conditioning that doubles as an inference-time CFG axis, (ii) a sweep over five score-conditioning architectures, where training and inference use different variants, (iii) expert iteration on the top decile, (iv) a short preference-tuning pass (CRPO) for audio-text alignment, and (v) inference post-processing via joint CFG, source separation, and loudness normalization. Per-stage decomposition on 100 Song Describer prompts shows training-time reward conditioning as a functional conditioning axis, expert iteration as the dominant contributor, the preference-tuning pass adding only noise-level gain, and the inference-time score scalar already saturated by the end of the chain.