Daeyong Kwon

Daeyong Kwon, Qiyu Wu, Shinobu Kuriya et al.

Recent Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated promising abilities in understanding musical content. However, whether their responses are grounded in the correct temporal regions of the audio remains underexplored. This limitation is particularly critical for music understanding, where key information often occurs as temporally localized events, such as instrument entries and rhythmic transitions. To address this gap, we introduce MusTBENCH, a music-expert-validated benchmark designed to evaluate temporal grounding in LALMs through five temporally grounded question-answering tasks. To further improve temporal grounding in existing models, we propose MusT, a novel four-stage temporal optimization recipe spanning music encoder adaptation, LLM adaptation, LLM supervised fine-tuning, and RL-based optimization. Experiments on MusTBENCH show that existing LALMs struggle with precise temporal grounding, while MusT brings significant improvements over strong baselines. These results establish temporal grounding as a key missing capability in current LALMs and position MusTBENCH as a challenging benchmark for future research in temporally grounded music understanding.

Daeyong Kwon, SeungHeon Doh, Juhan Nam

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have transformed open-domain question answering, yet their effectiveness in music-related reasoning remains limited due to sparse music knowledge in pretraining data. While music information retrieval and computational musicology have explored structured and multimodal understanding, few resources support factual and contextual music question answering (MQA) grounded in artist metadata or historical context. We introduce MusWikiDB, a vector database of 3.2M passages from 144K music-related Wikipedia pages, and ArtistMus, a benchmark of 1,000 questions on 500 diverse artists with metadata such as genre, debut year, and topic. These resources enable systematic evaluation of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for MQA. Experiments show that RAG markedly improves factual accuracy; open-source models gain up to +56.8 percentage points (for example, Qwen3 8B improves from 35.0 to 91.8), approaching proprietary model performance. RAG-style fine-tuning further boosts both factual recall and contextual reasoning, improving results on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. MusWikiDB also yields approximately 6 percentage points higher accuracy and 40% faster retrieval than a general-purpose Wikipedia corpus. We release MusWikiDB and ArtistMus to advance research in music information retrieval and domain-specific question answering, establishing a foundation for retrieval-augmented reasoning in culturally rich domains such as music.

Daeyong Kwon, SeungHeon Doh, Juhan Nam

Recent advancements in Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains. While they exhibit strong zero-shot performance on various tasks, LLMs' effectiveness in music-related applications remains limited due to the relatively small proportion of music-specific knowledge in their training data. To address this limitation, we propose MusT-RAG, a comprehensive framework based on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to adapt general-purpose LLMs for text-only music question answering (MQA) tasks. RAG is a technique that provides external knowledge to LLMs by retrieving relevant context information when generating answers to questions. To optimize RAG for the music domain, we (1) propose MusWikiDB, a music-specialized vector database for the retrieval stage, and (2) utilizes context information during both inference and fine-tuning processes to effectively transform general-purpose LLMs into music-specific models. Our experiment demonstrates that MusT-RAG significantly outperforms traditional fine-tuning approaches in enhancing LLMs' music domain adaptation capabilities, showing consistent improvements across both in-domain and out-of-domain MQA benchmarks. Additionally, our MusWikiDB proves substantially more effective than general Wikipedia corpora, delivering superior performance and computational efficiency.