mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

TuneJury: An Open Metric for Improving Music Generation Preference Alignment

arXiv 2606.17006 ↗First posted 15 Jun 2026cs.SD cs.AI cs.LGcited by 4

On the map: LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation → Preference alignment for recommenders and RAG

Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce TuneJury, an open, instance-level pairwise reward model for text-to-music that predicts a music preference score from a text prompt and an audio clip. The released checkpoint is trained on publicly available human-preference labels covering arena-style (A vs. B) votes, metric-alignment preference pairs, crowdsourced pairwise comparisons, and expert aesthetic ratings. The predicted score margin between two clips is well calibrated on our held-out test split, supporting data filtering via a simple score threshold. TuneJury generalizes to both held-out test pairs and out-of-distribution benchmarks, remaining competitive with prior baselines on the latter. For generators released after training, we introduce anchor calibration, a post-hoc, per-system Bradley-Terry calibration that recovers agreement at substantially better data efficiency than from-scratch retraining. The same frozen reward drives consistent reward-axis gains across three downstream applications: inference-time best-of-N selection, DITTO-style latent optimization, and expert-iteration post-training. TuneJury is available at https://github.com/yonghyunk1m/TuneJury.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Preference alignment for recommenders and RAG, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation. Builds on 56 of its 68 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2026.

Builds on

56 of 68 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026CMI-RewardBench: Evaluating Music Reward Models with Compositional Multimodal Instruction28 Feb
  2. 2025SpeechJudge: Towards Human-Level Judgment for Speech Naturalness11 Nov
  3. 2025Aligning Text-to-Music Evaluation with Human Preferences20 Mar
  4. 2024TangoFlux: Super Fast and Faithful Text to Audio Generation with Flow Matching and Clap-Ranked Preference Optimization30 Dec
  5. 2024Tango 2: Aligning Diffusion-based Text-to-Audio Generations through Direct Preference Optimization15 Apr
  6. 2024MusicRL: Aligning Music Generation to Human Preferences6 Feb

Other references · 50

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  3. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 8,065
  4. 2015Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shiftcited by 7,005
  5. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
  6. 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,847
  7. 2017On Calibration of Modern Neural Networkscited by 4,960
  8. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferencescited by 3,912
  9. 2022Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimizationcited by 1,095
  10. 2023ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 1,045
  11. 2023Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learningcited by 982
  12. 2023Pick-a-Pic: An Open Dataset of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generationcited by 977
38 more
  1. 2023Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesiscited by 890
  2. 2022Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentationcited by 719
  3. 2023Reinforced Self-Training (ReST) for Language Modelingcited by 500
  4. 2023Simple and Controllable Music Generationcited by 488
  5. 2021MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontierscited by 470
  6. 2023DPOK: Reinforcement Learning for Fine-tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 450
  7. 2023Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable Rewardscited by 448
  8. 2025DanceGRPO: Unleashing GRPO on Visual Generationcited by 413
  9. 2023Beyond Human Data: Scaling Self-Training for Problem-Solving with Language Modelscited by 349
  10. 2023AudioLDM 2: Learning Holistic Audio Generation with Self-supervised Pretrainingcited by 344
  11. 2017Thinking Fast and Slow with Deep Learning and Tree Searchcited by 252
  12. 2016FMA: A Dataset For Music Analysiscited by 207
  13. 2022Defining and Characterizing Reward Hackingcited by 203
  14. 2023MERT: Acoustic Music Understanding Model with Large-Scale Self-supervised Trainingcited by 181
  15. 2025Meta Audiobox Aesthetics: Unified Automatic Quality Assessment for Speech, Music, and Soundcited by 137
  16. 2019MOSNet: Deep Learning based Objective Assessment for Voice Conversioncited by 127
  17. 2023MusicLDM: Enhancing Novelty in Text-to-Music Generation Using Beat-Synchronous Mixup Strategiescited by 94
  18. 2023Adapting Frechet Audio Distance for Generative Music Evaluationcited by 92
  19. 2024DITTO: Diffusion Inference-Time T-Optimization for Music Generationcited by 73
  20. 2023The Song Describer Dataset: a Corpus of Audio Captions for Music-and-Language Evaluationcited by 68
  21. 2025MuQ: Self-Supervised Music Representation Learning with Mel Residual Vector Quantizationcited by 68
  22. 2025ACE-Step: A Step Towards Music Generation Foundation Modelcited by 56
  23. 2024Foundation Models for Music: A Surveycited by 37
  24. 2024Post-hoc Reward Calibration: A Case Study on Length Biascited by 29
  25. 2025SongEval: A Benchmark Dataset for Song Aesthetics Evaluationcited by 26
  26. 2025KAD: No More FAD! An Effective and Efficient Evaluation Metric for Audio Generationcited by 24
  27. 2024PAM: Prompting Audio-Language Models for Audio Quality Assessmentcited by 20
  28. 2024MidiCaps: A large-scale MIDI dataset with text captionscited by 19
  29. 2025MusicEval: A Generative Music Dataset with Expert Ratings for Automatic Text-to-Music Evaluationcited by 18
  30. 2025Benchmarking Music Generation Models and Metrics via Human Preference Studiescited by 15
  31. 2025Fast Text-to-Audio Generation with Adversarial Post-Trainingcited by 14
  32. 2025MeanAudio: Fast and Faithful Text-to-Audio Generation with Mean Flowscited by 14
  33. 2023Investigating Range-Equalizing Bias in Mean Opinion Score Ratings of Synthesized Speechcited by 13
  34. 2025Survey on the Evaluation of Generative Models in Musiccited by 10
  35. 2025Music Arena: Live Evaluation for Text-to-Musiccited by 8
  36. 2025CHARM: Calibrating Reward Models With Chatbot Arena Scorescited by 7
  37. 2025SingMOS-Pro: An Comprehensive Benchmark for Singing Quality Assessmentcited by 7
  38. 2026MuQ-Eval: An Open-Source Per-Sample Quality Metric for AI Music Generation Evaluationcited by 6

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Aligning Generative Music AI with Human Preferences: Methods and Challenges
  2. 2025MR-FlowDPO: Multi-Reward Direct Preference Optimization for Flow-Matching Text-to-Music Generation
  3. 2026Aligning Language Models for Lyric-to-Melody Generation with Rule-Based Musical Constraints
  4. 2026Inferring Value Criteria from Ordinal Preferences: An Iterative In-Context Learning Framework for Music Generation ↗
  5. 2025Preference-Based Learning in Audio Applications: A Systematic Analysis
  6. 2025LeVo: High-Quality Song Generation with Multi-Preference Alignment
  7. 2026Auditing Training Data in Generative Music Models via Black-Box Membership Inference
  8. 2025DiffRhythm 2: Efficient and High Fidelity Song Generation via Block Flow Matching