Yixiao Zhang

profile 

PhD Student in Artificial Intelligence and Music,
Centre for Digital Music (C4DM),
Queen Mary University of London
ENG 408
Phone: +44 0752 914 6850
E-mail: yixiao.zhang [@] qmul [DOT] ac [DOT] uk
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The Chinese version: homepage

News

  • I am honored to become a reviewer at ISMIR 2023.

  • I will join Sony Corporation during October - December 2023 as an intern.

  • I will join Yamaha R&D during June - August 2023 as an intern.

About me

  • I am currently the 3rd-year PhD in AIM Program, Queen Mary University of London. I am honored to be advised by Prof. Simon Dixon and Dr. Mark Levy.

  • Before that, I was a Research Assistant in the Music X Lab at NYU Shanghai from 2019 to 2020, working on music generation.

  • I received the Bachelor of Engineering degree (2015-2019) in Computer Science and Technology from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC).

Research Interests

  • I currently work on multimodal music representation learning (music + text) for music generation.

Education

  • 2020.9 - Current: PhD Student in Artificial Intelligence and Music, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), UK

  • 2015.9 - 2019.6: Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science and Technology, UESTC, China

Research Experience

  • 2020.9 - Current: PhD Student, Queen Mary University of London. Supervisor: Prof. Simon Dixon and Dr. Mark Levy

    • Topic: Machine Learning Methods for Artificial Musicality (in collaboration with Apple)

  • 2022.7 - 2022.8: Research Assistant, Machine Learning Department, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

  • 2019.6 - 2020.9: Research Assistant, Music X Lab, NYU Shanghai. Supervisor: Dr. Gus Xia

    • Topic: Music Representation Learning, Music Generation

  • 2018.11 - 2019.6: Research Intern, Machine Learning Group, Microsoft Research Asia. Supervisor: Dr. Weiqing Liu and Dr. Xiao Yang

    • Topic: Meta Learning on Finaincial Data Prediction

  • 2018.7 - 2018.10: Undergraduate Research Assistant, University of Lethbridge, Canada. Supervisor: Prof. Yllias Chali

    • Topic: Deep Learning Methods on Text Summarization

  • 2016.9 - 2018.6: Undergraduate Research Assistant, Institute of Intelligent Learning Science and Applications, UESTC. Supervisor: Prof. Hong Qu

    • Topic: Natural Language Processing

Conference Publications

2022

  • Runbang Zhang, Yixiao Zhang, Kai Shao, Ying Shan and Gus Xia, “Vis2Mus: Exploring Multimodal Representation Mapping for Controllable Music Generation”, arxiv

  • Yixiao Zhang, Junyan Jiang, Gus Xia and Simon Dixon, “Interpreting Song Lyrics with an Audio-Informed Pre-trained Language Model”, ISMIR 2022, Best Paper Award Nomination, Brave New Idea Award Nomination. arxiv

  • Junyan Jiang, Daniel Chin, Yixiao Zhang and Gus Xia, “Learning Hierarchical Metrical Structure Beyond Measures”, ISMIR 2022. arxiv

  • Shiqi Wei, Gus Xia, Yixiao Zhang, Liwei Lin and Weiguo Gao, “Music Phrase inpainting using long-term representation and contrastive loss”, ICASSP 2022. arxiv

2021

  • Yixiao Zhang and Simon Dixon, “Generating Comments from Music and Lyrics”, DMRN+16 Workshop (Poster).

  • Nick Bryan-Kinns, Berker Banar, Corey Ford, Courtney N Reed, Yixiao Zhang, Simon Colton and Jack Armitage, “Exploring XAI for the Arts: Explaining Latent Space in Generative Music”, NeurIPS 2021 Workshop XAI4Debugging. paper

  • Yixiao Zhang, Gus Xia, Mark Levy and Simon Dixon, “COSMIC: A Conversational Interface for Human-AI Music Co-Creation”, NIME 2021. paper

2020

  • Yixiao Zhang, Ziyu Wang, Dingsu Wang and Gus Xia, “BUTTER: A Representation Learning Framework for Bi-directional Music-Sentence Retrieval and Generation”, NLP4MusA Workshop for ISMIR 2020. paper

  • Ziyu Wang, Yiyi Zhang, Yixiao Zhang, Junyan Jiang, Ruihan Yang, Junbo Zhao(Jake) and Gus Xia, “PianoTree VAE: Structured Representation Learning for Polyphonic Music,” ISMIR 2020. paper

  • Ziyu Wang, Dingsu Wang, Yixiao Zhang and Gus Xia, “Learning Interpretable Representation for Controllable Polyphonic Music Generation,” ISMIR 2020. paper

  • Yixiao Zhang and Gus Xia, “Symbolic Melody Phrase Segmentation Using Neural Network with Conditional Random Field”, CSMT 2020. paper

Book Chapters

  • The intersection of audio, music and computers: audio & music technology (ii), ISBN: 978-7-309-15990-5/J.466. Contributed to the writing of Chapter 11.

Community Activities

I have been invited to serve as a reviewer for the TISMIR journal; have volunteered for the AI Song Contest 2022, NIME 2021, and ISMIR 2021; and have participated in the organization of the DMRN+16 workshop.

Teaching Assistants

2023 Spring

  • ECS7013P Deep Learning for Music and Audio

  • ECS784P Data Analytics

2022 Fall

  • ECS708P Machine Learning

  • ECS759P Artificial Intelligence

2022 Spring

  • ECS759P Artificial Intelligence

2021 Fall

  • ECS7020P Principles of Machine Learning

  • ECS759P Artificial Intelligence

2017 Fall

  • C & Cpp Programming

Blog Posts

  • Representation Learning for Controllable Music Generation: A Survey, 2020 link

  • “A glance at ISMIR” series 2021 / 2020