# Do Captioning Metrics Reflect Music Semantic Alignment?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.11692 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11692/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Nov 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Assessing Factual Music Comprehension in Large Audio Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05550/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Music captioning has emerged as a promising task, fueled by the advent of advanced language generation models. However, the evaluation of music captioning relies heavily on traditional metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE which were developed for other domains, without proper justification for their use in this new field. We present cases where traditional metrics are vulnerable to syntactic changes, and show they do not correlate well with human judgments. By addressing these issues, we aim to emphasize the need for a critical reevaluation of how music captions are assessed.