BeatEdit: Symbolic Music Generation as Explicit Editing
Proposed BeatEdit, the first framework that formulates symbolic music generation as explicit editing. Starting from the prior that composing is revising rather than generating from scratch, it traces the absence of edit-based methods to the representation level, formalizes the required encoding properties, and designs three complementary editing mechanisms along an axis of edit density. It clearly outperforms conventional generative models in matching accuracy across tasks with inference two orders of magnitude faster, and reveals encoding-method interaction as an overlooked design lever.
