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Main Authors: Zhao, Zijian, Jin, Dian, Zhou, Zijing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22378
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author Zhao, Zijian
Jin, Dian
Zhou, Zijing
author_facet Zhao, Zijian
Jin, Dian
Zhou, Zijing
contents Recently, Image-to-Music (I2M) generation has garnered significant attention, with potential applications in fields such as gaming, advertising, and multi-modal art creation. However, due to the ambiguous and subjective nature of I2M tasks, most end-to-end methods lack interpretability, leaving users puzzled about the generation results. Even methods based on emotion mapping face controversy, as emotion represents only a singular aspect of art. Additionally, most learning-based methods require substantial computational resources and large datasets for training, hindering accessibility for common users. To address these challenges, we propose the first Vision Language Model (VLM)-based I2M framework that offers high interpretability and low computational cost. Specifically, we utilize ABC notation to bridge the text and music modalities, enabling the VLM to generate music using natural language. We then apply multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and self-refinement techniques to allow the VLM to produce high-quality music without external training. Furthermore, we leverage the generated motivations in text and the attention maps from the VLM to provide explanations for the generated results in both text and image modalities. To validate our method, we conduct both human studies and machine evaluations, where our method outperforms others in terms of music quality and music-image consistency, indicating promising results. Our code is available at https://github.com/RS2002/Image2Music .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_22378
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Zero-Effort Image-to-Music Generation: An Interpretable RAG-based VLM Approach
Zhao, Zijian
Jin, Dian
Zhou, Zijing
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Multimedia
Audio and Speech Processing
Recently, Image-to-Music (I2M) generation has garnered significant attention, with potential applications in fields such as gaming, advertising, and multi-modal art creation. However, due to the ambiguous and subjective nature of I2M tasks, most end-to-end methods lack interpretability, leaving users puzzled about the generation results. Even methods based on emotion mapping face controversy, as emotion represents only a singular aspect of art. Additionally, most learning-based methods require substantial computational resources and large datasets for training, hindering accessibility for common users. To address these challenges, we propose the first Vision Language Model (VLM)-based I2M framework that offers high interpretability and low computational cost. Specifically, we utilize ABC notation to bridge the text and music modalities, enabling the VLM to generate music using natural language. We then apply multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and self-refinement techniques to allow the VLM to produce high-quality music without external training. Furthermore, we leverage the generated motivations in text and the attention maps from the VLM to provide explanations for the generated results in both text and image modalities. To validate our method, we conduct both human studies and machine evaluations, where our method outperforms others in terms of music quality and music-image consistency, indicating promising results. Our code is available at https://github.com/RS2002/Image2Music .
title Zero-Effort Image-to-Music Generation: An Interpretable RAG-based VLM Approach
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Multimedia
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22378