Harnessing High-Level Song Descriptors towards Natural Language-Based Music Recommendation

Recommender systems relying on Language Models (LMs) have gained popularity in assisting users to navigate large catalogs. LMs often exploit item high-level descriptors, i.e. categories or consumption contexts, from training data or user preferences. This has been proven effective in domains like movies or products. However, in the music domain, understanding how effectively LMs utilize song descriptors for natural language-based music recommendation is relatively limited. In this paper, we assess LMs effectiveness in recommending songs based on user natural language descriptions and items with descriptors like genres, moods, and listening contexts. We formulate the recommendation task as a dense retrieval problem and assess LMs as they become increasingly familiar with data pertinent to the task and domain. Our findings reveal improved performance as LMs are fine-tuned for general language similarity, information retrieval, and mapping longer descriptions to shorter, high-level descriptors in music.

Detecting music deepfakes is easy but actually hard

In the face of a new era of generative models, the detection of artificially generated content has become a matter of utmost importance. The ability to create credible minute-long music deepfakes in a few seconds on user-friendly platforms poses a real threat of fraud on streaming services and unfair competition to human artists. This paper demonstrates the possibility (and surprising ease) of training classifiers on datasets comprising real audio and fake reconstructions, achieving a convincing accuracy of 99.8%. To our knowledge, this marks the first publication of a music deepfake detector, a tool that will help in the regulation of music forgery. Nevertheless, informed by decades of literature on forgery detection in other fields, we stress that a good test score is not the end of the story. We step back from the straightforward ML framework and expose many facets that could be problematic with such a deployed detector: calibration, robustness to audio manipulation, generalisation to unseen models, interpretability and possibility for recourse. This second part acts as a position for future research steps in the field and a caveat to a flourishing market of fake content checkers.