steinmetz
WildFX: A DAW-Powered Pipeline for In-the-Wild Audio FX Graph Modeling
Yang, Qihui, Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor, McAuley, Julian, Novack, Zachary
Despite rapid progress in end-to-end AI music generation, AI-driven modeling of professional Digital Signal Processing (DSP) workflows remains challenging. In particular, while there is growing interest in neural black-box modeling of audio effect graphs (e.g. reverb, compression, equalization), AI-based approaches struggle to replicate the nuanced signal flow and parameter interactions used in professional workflows. Existing differentiable plugin approaches often diverge from real-world tools, exhibiting inferior performance relative to simplified neural controllers under equivalent computational constraints. We introduce WildFX, a pipeline containerized with Docker for generating multi-track audio mixing datasets with rich effect graphs, powered by a professional Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) backend. WildFX supports seamless integration of cross-platform commercial plugins or any plugins in the wild, in VST/VST3/LV2/CLAP formats, enabling structural complexity (e.g., sidechains, crossovers) and achieving efficient parallelized processing. A minimalist metadata interface simplifies project/plugin configuration. Experiments demonstrate the pipeline's validity through blind estimation of mixing graphs, plugin/gain parameters, and its ability to bridge AI research with practical DSP demands. The code is available on: https://github.com/IsaacYQH/WildFX.
Adoption of AI Technology in the Music Mixing Workflow: An Investigation
Vanka, Soumya Sai, Safi, Maryam, Rolland, Jean-Baptiste, Fazekas, George
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in the music industry is driving a significant change in the way music is being composed, produced and mixed. This study investigates the current state of AI in the mixing workflows and its adoption by different user groups. Through semi-structured interviews, a questionnaire-based study, and analyzing web forums, the study confirms three user groups comprising amateurs, pro-ams, and professionals. Our findings show that while AI mixing tools can simplify the process and provide decent results for amateurs, pro-ams seek precise control and customization options, while professionals desire control and customization options in addition to assistive and collaborative technologies. The study provides strategies for designing effective AI mixing tools for different user groups and outlines future directions.
Steinmetz
We propose a method to guide a Monte Carlo search in the initial moves of the game of Go. Our method matches the current state of a Go board against clusters of board configurations that are derived from a large number of games played by experts. The main advantage of this method is that it does not require an exact match of the current board, and hence is effective for a longer sequence of moves compared to traditional opening books. We apply this method to two different open-source Go-playing programs. Our experiments show that this method, through its filtering or biasing the choice of a next move to a small subset of possible moves, improves play effectively in the initial moves of a game.
Steinmetz
Maximizing goal probability is an important objective in probabilistic planning, yet algorithms for its optimal solution are severely underexplored. There is scant evidence of what the empirical state of the art actually is. Focusing on heuristic search, we close this gap with a comprehensive empirical analysis of known and adapted algorithms. We explore both, the general case where there may be 0-reward cycles, and the practically relevant special case of acyclic planning, like planning with a limited action-cost budget. We consider three different algorithmic objectives.
Bridging the Gap Between Probabilistic Model Checking and Probabilistic Planning: Survey, Compilations, and Empirical Comparison
Klauck, Michaela (Saarland University, Saarland Informatics Campus) | Steinmetz, Marcel (Saarland University, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarland Informatics Campus) | Hoffmann, Jörg (Saarland University, Saarland Informatics Campus) | Hermanns, Holger (Saarland University, Saarland Informatics Campus)
Markov decision processes are of major interest in the planning community as well as in the model checking community. But in spite of the similarity in the considered formal models, the development of new techniques and methods happened largely independently in both communities. This work is intended as a beginning to unite the two research branches. We consider goal-reachability analysis as a common basis between both communities. The core of this paper is the translation from Jani, an overarching input language for quantitative model checkers, into the probabilistic planning domain definition language (PPDDL), and vice versa from PPDDL into Jani. These translations allow the creation of an overarching benchmark collection, including existing case studies from the model checking community, as well as benchmarks from the international probabilistic planning competitions (IPPC). We use this benchmark set as a basis for an extensive empirical comparison of various approaches from the model checking community, variants of value iteration, and MDP heuristic search algorithms developed by the AI planning community. On a per benchmark domain basis, techniques from one community can achieve state-ofthe-art performance in benchmarks of the other community. Across all benchmark domains of one community, the performance comparison is however in favor of the solvers and algorithms of that particular community. Reasons are the design of the benchmarks, as well as tool-related limitations. Our translation methods and benchmark collection foster crossfertilization between both communities, pointing out specific opportunities for widening the scope of solvers to different kinds of models, as well as for exchanging and adopting algorithms across communities.