Helping Music Co-Creation Agents 'Listen' Well: Hierarchical Self-Supervised World Models for Understanding and Generation

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

This preprint introduces hierarchical self-supervised world models for music co-creation agents, with fast CPU-friendly models and a live demo for MIDI inpainting and generation.

Collaborative music agents need internal representations rich enough to support both understanding and generation, yet flexible enough for a workflow where the human retains agency. We present a hierarchical self-supervised ``world model'' for symbolic music: a 2.55M-parameter Swin V2 encoder trained on MIDI piano-roll images with JEPA-style objectives (pitch- and time-shift equivariance, masked embedding prediction, and a distributional regularizer), using no labels and no music-theory vocabulary. Probing the frozen embeddings shows that the level at which a musical property becomes decodable tracks its musical time scale: phrase boundaries are read off the coarsest levels, note density and harmonic detail off the finest. Temporal and phrase structure emerge from the self-supervised objectives alone, while harmonic content must be asked for; a small chord-supervision head raises joint chord recovery from .18 to .54, and key detection, which is never supervised, from .16 to .70. Following the Representation AutoEncoder paradigm, a conditional flow-matching model stands in for a trained decoder, flowing in pixel space from PCA-reduced conditioning: it reproduces a target window at pixel F1 0.996, and the same per-level conditioning dropout that controls how far variations stray also enables graphical prompting for masked inpainting with no inpainting-specific sampler. The pipeline runs on CPU producing a suggestion in 2.8 s, or 0.6 s on Apple MPS, which we demonstrate in a live interactive demo. In concert with an LLM-based brain, these capabilities supply the core of a collaborative music creation agent in service of, rather than in place of, human agency.
Original Article
View Cached Full Text

Cached at: 08/07/26, 01:54 AM

Paper page - Helping Music Co-Creation Agents ‘Listen’ Well: Hierarchical Self-Supervised World Models for Understanding and Generation

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2608.04378 Excited to share a new Preprint & LIVE DEMO! This is >2 years of my life building fast, lightweight CPU-friendly models to facilitate songwriters’ iterative workflows, with Representations usable for Understanding and Generation, trained in a Self-Supervised way. First, the demo: https://drscotthawley-midi-rae-jepa-son.hf.space

This turned outso funthat I had to pause paper-writing to revamp it into a user-friendly app to send to friends! You draw an inpainting mask that controls where spatial dropout occurs, and the “EQ”-looking sliders scale the abstraction level.

The preprint is here:https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04378The first 6 pages + refs are submitted to the NeurIPS Creative AI Track (“single-blind, preprints ok” 👍) Preprint adds 10 pages of Supplemental Materials: ablation studies, hyperparameter surveys, etc.

You may have seen another preprint from me a couple weeks ago (https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14537), which was the project state mid-April 2026 submitted to ISMIR (double-blind, gag order) but the new preprint is the more mature one (despite being the “-SON”!)

The story started with the “graphical prompts” of “Pictures of MIDI” ca. Jan. 2024 (https://picturesofmidi.github.io/PicturesOfMIDI/) but that was big & slow. The quest to streamline it led me to Flow Models (fast sampling), Representation AutoEncoders (reusable rep’s), and LeJEPA (to resist collapse).

You could wade through my messy “midi-rae” work repo but maybe best to wait til I push a clean distro-repo in the coming weeks. Stay tuned via the links on the project website:https://drscotthawley.github.io/midi-rae-jepa-son/Weights are closed for now; I’ll probably open them closer to NeurIPS time.

Similar Articles