ArXiv

TuneJury: An Open Metric for Improving Music Generation Preference Alignment

Authors
Yonghyun Kim, Junwon Lee, Haiwen Xia...
Categories
cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.MM, eess.AS
arXiv
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17006v1
PDF
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.17006v1

Brief

TuneJury is an open pairwise reward model for text-to-music that scores how well an audio clip matches a text prompt; the released checkpoint was trained on diverse public human-preference labels (A vs. B, metric-alignment pairs, crowdsourced and expert ratings). The score margins are well calibrated on held-out data, generalize OOD, and enable efficient post-hoc anchor (Bradley–Terry) calibration and practical gains in selection, latent optimization, and post-training. The repository and paper (arXiv: 2026-06-15) are publicly available.

Source evidence

Abstract

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.

Comment: 32 pages, 9 figures