English

ConceptCaps: a Distilled Concept Dataset for Interpretability in Music Models

Sound 2026-02-05 v3 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Concept-based interpretability methods like TCAV require clean, well-separated positive and negative examples for each concept. Existing music datasets lack this structure: tags are sparse, noisy, or ill-defined. We introduce ConceptCaps, a dataset of 21k music-caption-tags triplets with explicit labels from a 200-attribute taxonomy. Our pipeline separates semantic modeling from text generation: a VAE learns plausible attribute co-occurrence patterns, a fine-tuned LLM converts attribute lists into professional descriptions, and MusicGen synthesizes corresponding audio. This separation improves coherence and controllability over end-to-end approaches. We validate the dataset through audio-text alignment (CLAP), linguistic quality metrics (BERTScore, MAUVE), and TCAV analysis confirming that concept probes recover musically meaningful patterns. Dataset and code are available online.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.14157,
  title  = {ConceptCaps: a Distilled Concept Dataset for Interpretability in Music Models},
  author = {Bruno Sienkiewicz and Łukasz Neumann and Mateusz Modrzejewski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.14157},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:12:45.971Z