← Search

Zachary Novack

13 accepted papers

2026

LOW-RESOURCE GUIDANCE FOR CONTROLLABLE LATENT AUDIO DIFFUSION

ICASSP 2026poster

Generative audio requires fine-grained controllable outputs, yet most existing methods require model retraining on specific controls or inference-time controls (\textit{e.g.}, guidance) that can also be computationally demanding. By examining the bottlenecks of existing guidance-based controls, in p…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Steering Autoregressive Music Generation with Recursive Feature Machines

ICLR 2026poster

Controllable music generation remains a significant challenge, with existing methods often requiring model retraining or introducing audible artifacts. We introduce MusicRFM, a framework that adapts Recursive Feature Machines (RFMs) to enable fine-grained, interpretable control over frozen, pre-trai…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Zephyrus: An Agentic Framework for Weather Science

ICLR 2026poster

Foundation models for weather science are pre-trained on vast amounts of structured numerical data and outperform traditional weather forecasting systems. However, these models lack language-based reasoning capabilities, limiting their utility in interactive scientific workflows. Large language mode…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

CoLLAP: Contrastive Long-form Language-Audio Pretraining with Musical Temporal Structure Augmentation

ICASSP 2025accepted

Modeling temporal characteristics plays a significant role in the representation learning of audio waveform. We propose Contrastive Long-form Language-Audio Pretraining (CoLLAP) to significantly extend the perception window for both the input audio (up to 5 minutes) and the language descriptions (ex…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

FUTGA-MIR: Enhancing Fine-grained and Temporally-aware Music Understanding with Music Information Retrieval

ICASSP 2025accepted

Recent music large language models (music LLMs) have shown great potential in music understanding through large-scale multimodal pre-training. While some existing music LLMs have been augmented with temporally-aware music captions, music information retrieval (MIR) features conventionally do not exi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

PDMX: A Large-Scale Public Domain MusicXML Dataset for Symbolic Music Processing

ICASSP 2025accepted

The recent explosion of generative AI-Music systems has raised numerous concerns over data copyright, licensing music from musicians, and the conflict between open-source AI and large prestige companies. Such issues highlight the need for publicly available, copyright-free musical data, in which the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Presto! Distilling Steps and Layers for Accelerating Music Generation

ICLR 2025spotlight

Despite advances in diffusion-based text-to-music (TTM) methods, efficient, high-quality generation remains a challenge. We introduce Presto!, an approach to inference acceleration for score-based diffusion transformers via reducing both sampling steps and cost per step. To reduce steps, we develop…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2025

Repurposing Marigold for Zero-Shot Metric Depth Estimation via Defocus Blur Cues

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Recent monocular metric depth estimation (MMDE) methods have made notable progress towards zero-shot generalization. However, they still exhibit a significant performance drop on out-of-distribution datasets. We address this limitation by injecting defocus blur cues at inference time into Marigold,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Synthesizing Composite Hierarchical Structure from Symbolic Music Corpora

IJCAI 2025

Western music is an innately hierarchical system of interacting levels of structure, from fine-grained melody to high-level form. In order to analyze music compositions holistically and at multiple granularities, we propose a unified, hierarchical meta-representation of musical structure called the

2025

WildScore: Benchmarking MLLMs in-the-Wild Symbolic Music Reasoning

EMNLP 2025

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various vision-language tasks. However, their reasoning abilities in the multimodal symbolic music domain remain largely unexplored.We introduce WildScore, the first in-the-wild multimodal sy

2024

DITTO: Diffusion Inference-Time T-Optimization for Music Generation

ICML 2024oral

We propose Diffusion Inference-Time T-Optimization (DITTO), a general-purpose framework for controlling pre-trained text-to-music diffusion models at inference-time via optimizing initial noise latents. Our method can be used to optimize through any differentiable feature matching loss to achieve a…

2023

CHiLS: Zero-Shot Image Classification with Hierarchical Label Sets

ICML 2023poster

Open vocabulary models (e.g. CLIP) have shown strong performance on zero-shot classification through their ability generate embeddings for each class based on their (natural language) names. Prior work has focused on improving the accuracy of these models through prompt engineering or by incorporati…

2023

Disentangling the Mechanisms Behind Implicit Regularization in SGD

ICLR 2023poster

A number of competing hypotheses have been proposed to explain why small-batch Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) leads to improved generalization over the full-batch regime, with recent work crediting the implicit regularization of various quantities throughout training. However, to date, empirical…