2025.emnlp-main.853@ACL

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#1 WildScore: Benchmarking MLLMs in-the-Wild Symbolic Music Reasoning [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Gagan Mundada, Yash Vishe, Amit Namburi, Xin Xu, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu

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 symbolic music reasoning and analysis benchmark, designed to evaluate MLLMs’ capacity to interpret real-world music scores and answer complex musicological queries. Each instance in WildScore is sourced from genuine musical compositions and accompanied by authentic user-generated questions and discussions, capturing the intricacies of practical music analysis. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation, we propose a systematic taxonomy,comprising both high-level and fine-grained musicological ontologies. Furthermore, we frame complex music reasoning as multiple-choice question answering,enabling controlled and scalable assessment of MLLMs’ symbolic music understanding. Empirical benchmarking of state-of-the-art MLLMs on WildScore reveals intriguing patterns in their visual-symbolic reasoning, uncovering both promising directions and persistent challenges for MLLMs in symbolic music reasoning and analysis.We release the dataset and code.

Subject: EMNLP.2025 - Main