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tags:
- music
- symbolic-music
- piano
- mirex
- midi
---
# DAMN for Piano Music Continuation
**DAMN (Delta-Absolute Modeling with Nested Transformers)** is a hierarchical autoregressive model for symbolic piano continuation, submitted to the **MIREX 2026 Symbolic Music Generation** task.
The model uses a score-level Transformer to model dependencies across notes and a note-level Transformer to autoregressively predict delta-onset, pitch, and duration.
## MIREX 2026 results
The submitted 144M DAMN achieves the highest mean coherency and structure scores in the official listening evaluation.
| System | Coherency ↑ | Structure ↑ | Creativity ↑ | Musicality ↑ |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| DAMN | **3.68 ± 0.16**<sup>a</sup> | **3.39 ± 0.18**<sup>a</sup> | 3.18 ± 0.16<sup>a</sup> | 3.47 ± 0.14<sup>a</sup> |
| PhraseSplitGen | 2.95 ± 0.18<sup>b</sup> | 2.74 ± 0.15<sup>b</sup> | 2.89 ± 0.15<sup>a</sup> | 2.61 ± 0.14<sup>b</sup> |
| MuseCoco (1.2B) | 2.79 ± 0.17<sup>b</sup> | 2.76 ± 0.15<sup>b</sup> | **3.42 ± 0.12**<sup>a</sup> | 2.68 ± 0.16<sup>b</sup> |
| Anticipatory Music Transformer (780M) | 3.47 ± 0.20<sup>a</sup> | 3.34 ± 0.16<sup>a</sup> | 3.34 ± 0.16<sup>a</sup> | **3.61 ± 0.17**<sup>a</sup> |
Mean ± SEM on five-point scales; bold marks the highest mean. Different letters within a column indicate significance at `p < 0.05` under the organizers' Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with Holm–Bonferroni correction.
The study used 8 prompts and 12 listeners, with 38 ratings per system. One continuation was selected from 8 candidates per system and prompt.
[Official results](https://music-ir.org/mirex/wiki/2026:Symbolic_Music_Generation_Results) · [Listening demo](https://futuremirex.com/demos/symbolic-music-generation-2026/)
## Model
- **Parameters:** 144M
- **Score-level decoder:** 14 layers
- **Note-level decoder:** 2 layers
- **Hidden size:** 768
## Inference
Inference code and usage instructions are available in the submission repository: [`naivecynics/MIREX2026-DAMN`](https://github.com/naivecynics/MIREX2026-DAMN)
## DAMN-Mini
The 20.5M-parameter absolute-start RoPE + EOS model is available under
[`mini/`](mini/README.md). The original 144M checkpoint remains at the repository
root. Both variants use the same inference implementation.
```bash
hf download naivecynics/MIREX2026-DAMN mini/model.safetensors mini/config.json --local-dir model
DAMN_MODEL_DIR="$PWD/model/mini" ./generation.sh input.json outputs/mini 8
```
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