# Pianist Transformer: Towards Expressive Piano Performance Rendering via Scalable Self-Supervised Pre-Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02652 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02652/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13663/) (2024)
- [Compound Word Transformer: Learning to Compose Full-Song Music over Dynamic Directed Hypergraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02402/) (2021)
- [MusicBERT: Symbolic Music Understanding with Large-Scale Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05630/) (2021)
- [POP909: A Pop-song Dataset for Music Arrangement Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07142/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning of Musical Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09410/) (2021)
- [This Time with Feeling: Learning Expressive Musical Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.03715/) (2018)
- [Multi-instrument Music Synthesis with Spectrogram Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05408/) (2022)
- [GiantMIDI-Piano: A large-scale MIDI dataset for classical piano music](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07061/) (2020)
- [Encoder-Decoder Gemma: Improving the Quality-Efficiency Trade-Off via Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06225/) (2025)
- [PDMX: A Large-Scale Public Domain MusicXML Dataset for Symbolic Music Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10831/) (2024)
- [Aria-MIDI: A Dataset of Piano MIDI Files for Symbolic Music Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15071/) (2025)
- [Scaling Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Symbolic Piano Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23869/) (2025)
- [Moonbeam: A MIDI Foundation Model Using Both Absolute and Relative Music Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15559/) (2025)
- [Quantitative Estimation of Target Task Performance from Unsupervised Pretext Task in Semi/Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07299/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [On the Learnability of Test-Time Adaptation: A Recovery Complexity Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28057/) (2026)
- [AnchorSteer: Self-Discovered Concept Injection for Structure-Preserving Music Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31053/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing methods for expressive music performance rendering, a conditional generation task that aims to generate a human-like performance from a symbolic score, rely on supervised learning over small labeled datasets, which limits scaling of both data volume and model size, despite the availability of vast unlabeled music, as in vision and language. To address this gap, we introduce Pianist Transformer, with three key contributions: 1) introducing large-scale self-supervised learning into expressive piano performance rendering through a unified Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) representation, enabling pre-training on 10B tokens of unlabeled MIDI data; 2) an efficient asymmetric Transformer with note-level compression, substantially improving training efficiency, memory usage, and inference speed for long-context music modeling; 3) a state-of-the-art rendering model with an editable workflow, achieving strong objective and subjective results and enabling integration into real-world music production workflows. Overall, Pianist Transformer outlines a scalable path toward human-like performance synthesis in the music domain. Code, audio samples, and model checkpoints are available on our project page: https://yhj137.github.io/pianist-transformer-demo/.