@inproceedings{cao-etal-2026-anchored,
    title = "Anchored Cyclic Generation: A Novel Paradigm for Long-Sequence Symbolic Music Generation",
    author = "Cao, Boyu  and
      Qian, Lekai  and
      Li, Dehan  and
      Gu, Haoyu  and
      Xu, Mingda  and
      Liu, Qi",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1574/",
    pages = "31463--31476",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "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."
}