YuE2: open-weights song model that plans an editable score first, claims top WildSongBench score over Suno v5
The M-A-P research community (HKUST and partners) released YuE2, a ~3-4B open-weights song generator that first writes an editable melody-and-chord score (ABC notation) and then renders full songs with vocals and accompaniment at 48 kHz stereo, with zero-shot covers and conversational "agentic" music editing; its authors report it beat all evaluated open and proprietary systems, incl. Suno v5, on their 192-prompt WildSongBench (best-of-8).
Key facts
- Weights published on Hugging Face (m-a-p/YuE2-3B, YuE2-Vae) around 2026-09-09; tech report 2026-09-26, arXiv 2609.33757 on 2026-09-29
- Architecture: AR-NAR Mixture-of-Transformers generating symbolic scores and acoustic latents via flow matching; model card lists ~4B parameters despite the '3B' name
- Self-reported WildSongBench (192 prompts, run 2026-09-12): YuE2 best-of-8 SongBench avg 6.9632 vs Suno v5 6.8721
- Zero-shot covers: 0.647 CLEWS mAP on 948 works (self-reported)
- Lyrics in English and Mandarin; instrumental generation added 2026-09-25; companion MERT-v2 and SheetSage2 (audio-to-score) models
- License: weights CC BY-NC 4.0 (commercial license available; README says outputs may be monetized royalty-free), code Apache 2.0
- Community ports within days: GGUF, MLX, ComfyUI, many genre LoRAs
What happened
YuE (Jan 2025) was the first open lyrics-to-full-song model. YuE2 changes the approach: it writes a symbolic plan (melody and chords) that users can edit, then renders audio from it, which enables covers, score edits and chat-driven revisions. Benchmark claims are the authors' own and have not been independently reproduced. The arXiv id 2609.33757 is taken from the GitHub README and was not opened.
Why it matters
It is the strongest claim yet that an open model runnable on one consumer GPU matches the leading commercial song generator, released the same day Suno moved to licensed-data v6. Its non-commercial weight license limits commercial use.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Models
- YuE2-3B Multimodal Art Projection (M-A-P) · current
Related events
- ACE-Step 1.5: MIT-licensed song generator that runs on consumer GPUs ★★★
- Suno launches v6, its first music models trained on licensed music ★★★
Sources (4)
- codeGitHub: multimodal-art-projection/YuE (YuE2)
- codeHugging Face: m-a-p/YuE2-3B
- officialDemo page
- paperYuE (v1) paper, arXiv 2503.08638
id: 2026-09-09-yue2-open-music-model · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline