AI music had no open way to score a single clip: MuQ-Eval scores individual tracks and beats the closed-source option
AspireAI community · arXiv (MuQ-Eval)
MuQ-Eval is an open-source per-sample quality metric for generated music, trained as lightweight prediction heads over frozen MuQ-310M features using MusicEval, a set of clips from 31 text-to-music systems with expert ratings. Its simplest variant reaches system-level SRCC 0.957 and utterance-level SRCC 0.838 against human mean opinion scores, and LoRA-adapted models trained on as few as 150 clips already give usable correlation for a listener-specific evaluator. The authors report that encoder choice dominates every architectural and training decision, that the metric is sensitive to signal-level artifacts but insensitive to musical-structural distortion, and that it runs in real time on a single consumer GPU.
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Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.