P2-7: Aligning Text-to-Music Evaluation with Human Preferences
Yichen Huang, Zachary Novack, Koichi Saito, Jiatong Shi, Shinji Watanabe, Yuki Mitsufuji, John Thickstun, Chris Donahue
Subjects: Generative Tasks ; Novel datasets and use cases ; Evaluation, datasets, and reproducibility ; Qualitative evaluations ; Music and audio synthesis ; Evaluation metrics
Presented In-person
4-minute short-format presentation
Despite significant recent advances in generative acoustic text-to-music (TTM) modeling, robust evaluation of these models lags behind, relying in particular on the popular Fréchet Audio Distance (FAD). In this work, we rigorously study the design space of reference-based divergence metrics for evaluating TTM models through (1) designing four synthetic meta-evaluations to measure sensitivity to particular musical desiderata, and (2) collecting and evaluating on MusicPrefs, an open-source dataset of pairwise human preferences for TTM systems. We find that not only is the standard FAD setup inconsistent on both synthetic and human preference data, but that nearly all existing metrics fail to effectively capture desiderata, and are only weakly correlated with human perception. We propose a new metric, the MAUVE Audio Divergence (MAD), computed on representations from a self-supervised audio embedding model. We find that this metric effectively captures diverse musical desiderata (average rank correlation 0.84 for MAD vs. 0.49 for FAD) and also correlates more strongly with MusicPrefs (0.62 vs. 0.14).