Boyu Cao
2026
Anchored Cyclic Generation: A Novel Paradigm for Long-Sequence Symbolic Music Generation
Boyu Cao | Lekai Qian | Dehan Li | Haoyu Gu | Mingda Xu | Qi Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Boyu Cao | Lekai Qian | Dehan Li | Haoyu Gu | Mingda Xu | Qi Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Generating long sequences with structural coherence remains a fundamental challenge for autoregressive models across sequential generation tasks. In symbolic music generation, this challenge is particularly pronounced, as existing methods are constrained by the severe error accumulation inherent in autoregressive models, leading to poor performance in music quality and structural integrity. In this paper, we propose the Anchored Cyclic Generation (ACG) paradigm, which relies on anchor features from previously generated musical content to guide subsequent generation during the autoregressive process, effectively mitigating error accumulation in autoregressive methods. Based on the ACG paradigm, we further propose the Hierarchical Anchored Cyclic Generation (Hi-ACG) framework, which employs a systematic global-to-local generation strategy and is highly compatible with our specifically designed piano token, an efficient musical representation. The experimental results demonstrate that compared to traditional autoregressive models, the ACG paradigm reduces cosine distance by an average of 34.7% between predicted feature vectors and ground-truth semantic vectors. In long-sequence symbolic music generation tasks, the Hi-ACG framework significantly outperforms existing mainstream methods in both subjective and objective evaluations. Furthermore, the framework exhibits excellent task generalization capabilities, achieving superior performance in related tasks such as music completion.
iTAG: Inverse Design for Natural Text Generation with Accurate Causal Graph Annotations
Wenshuo Wang | Boyu Cao | Nan Zhuang | Wei Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Wenshuo Wang | Boyu Cao | Nan Zhuang | Wei Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
A fundamental obstacle to causal discovery from text is the lack of causally annotated text data for use as ground truth, due to high annotation costs. This motivates an important task of generating text with causal graph annotations. Early template-based generation methods sacrifice text naturalness in exchange for high causal graph annotation accuracy. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-dependent methods directly generate natural text from target graphs through LLMs, but do not guarantee causal graph annotation accuracy. Therefore, we propose iTAG, which performs real-world concept assignment to nodes before converting causal graphs into text in existing LLM-dependent methods. iTAG frames this process as an inverse problem with the causal graph as the target, iteratively examining and refining concept selection through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning so that the induced relations between concepts are as consistent as possible with the target causal relationships described by the causal graph. iTAG demonstrates both extremely high annotation accuracy and naturalness across extensive tests, and the results of testing text-based causal discovery algorithms with the generated data show high statistical correlation with real-world data. This suggests that iTAG-generated data can serve as a practical surrogate for scalable benchmarking of text-based causal discovery algorithms.