open-rvq-encoder-minimax-music3-169m — soft-distilled + calibrated (hotstep-v1)
Mothersuperior/open-rvq-encoder-minimax-music3-169m-pooled-v4 further-trained with a pure soft-distillation objective (soft cross-entropy against the teacher top-50 distributions shipped in the 8k corpus) plus learnable per-head logit temperatures, then selected on a real-audio gate that no other release in this lineage measures. Architecture, config, and file format are identical to the base — this is a drop-in replacement.
Three things in this release are useful even if you never load the weights:
1. Corpus consumption fixes (apply these before training on the 8k corpus)
uint16 wrap in probs.npz semantic ids. The semantic head's idx values were stored as raw
LM token ids (code + 151675) in a uint16, which silently wraps them mod 65536. They arrive as
code + 20603. Subtract 20603 and mask anything outside [0, 16384) (the EOS token wraps to −5).
Verified: after unwrapping, the sampled ground-truth code lands inside the teacher top-50 for
~100% of frames; consumed naively, the ids are garbage and soft-distillation losses are meaningless.
Stitched-timeline latent alignment. The corpus audio is stitched from 200-frame DiT windows at
a 100-frame / 345-latent hop (documented in the corpus card), while the naive uniform mapping
(latent = frame * 441 // 128 ≈ 344.53/100 frames) drifts ~1 latent per 800 frames. Measured
effect: semantic top-1 against ground-truth codes decays from 0.41 at track start to 0.06 by frame
2400 under the uniform rule. The correct frame→latent mapping for this corpus is:
def stitched_lat(i): # frame index -> DAV latent index
k = 0 if i < 125 else (i - 25) // 100 # chunk ownership (from local frame 25)
return 345 * k + ((i - 100 * k) * 441) // 128 + 1
The +1 is a constant global offset, verified empirically as best at every probed position on
every probed record (top-1 flat at 0.4–0.6 across track positions once applied). The corpus's own
DAV latents are exact — recomputing them from the shipped FLAC through the official dav.pth
reproduces them at cosine 1.0 — the drift lives in the audio-vs-codes timeline of chunked
rendering. Real audio has no such drift: the uniform mapping remains correct at inference.
2. Calibrated logits (folded)
The released v4/pooled-v4 readout logits are muP-sharp and uncalibrated: harmless for
argmax/top-K use (what the reference adapter and the ComfyUI/diffusers nodes do), but
cross-entropy and softmax probabilities computed from them are meaningless (semantic soft-CE ~59
nats at temperature 1; per-frame logit std ~45). This release trained learnable per-head
temperatures jointly with the model (initialised from a line search: ~16 semantic, ~2 acoustic)
and folded them into the head weights at export. Argmax and top-K ordering are unchanged;
softmax(logits) and CE are now meaningful out of the box. The final folded values are in
calibration.json.
3. The weights
Training: pure soft-CE vs teacher top-50 (all 8 heads; depth decoder teacher-forced), 20,000 steps
at effective batch 64 (16 × 4 grad-accum), lr 1e-4 cosine with 200-step warmup, bf16, single
RTX 5090, on the drift-corrected + unwrapped 8k corpus (records < 8 s filtered; 7,726 train / 394
holdout by salted-hash split). Trainer included in training/.
In-domain holdout (8k corpus, drift-corrected loader, calibrated CE)
| holdout metric | pooled-v4 (start) | this release (step 18500) | change |
|---|---|---|---|
| semantic soft-CE (vs teacher) | 3.299 | 3.039 | −7.9% |
| acoustic soft-CE | 4.618 | 4.413 | −4.4% |
| semantic hard-CE | 2.336 | 2.154 | −7.8% |
| acoustic hard-CE | 3.925 | 3.763 | −4.1% |
| semantic top-1 | 41.9% | 42.2% | +0.3 pt |
| acoustic top-1 | 16.8% | 17.6% | +0.8 pt |
In-domain argmax barely moves — the interesting result is below.
Real-audio gate (13 commercial studio recordings, frozen official LM/depth decoder base-CE)
The metric nobody else in the lineage reports: export codes from real recordings, measure the frozen official model's cross-entropy on them. Lower = the encoder's codes look more like codes the official model would emit. All prior rows reproduced on the same harness:
| encoder | params | sem CE | sem t1 | ac CE | ac t1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Serveurperso community 41M | 41M | 8.447 | 5.8% | 6.763 | 2.3% |
| Mothersuperior pooled-v3 | 41M | 7.261 | 8.5% | 6.347 | 4.5% |
| SimpleTuner v4 | 169M | 7.158 | 8.9% | 5.638 | 5.8% |
| Mothersuperior pooled-v4 | 169M | 6.838 | 10.9% | 5.373 | 7.5% |
| this release | 169M | 5.866 | 16.6% | 4.725 | 10.9% |
The largest single-step improvement in the lineage on this metric — and it happens at the argmax level (temperature folding cannot cause it), despite near-flat in-domain argmax accuracy. Soft distillation appears to act as regularisation against synthetic-audio overfit, transferring to real recordings. Caveat: semantic unique-code usage on the real-audio set drops ~14% vs the base (6,490 vs 7,515 over 64k frames; acoustic unchanged) — mild concentration, far from collapse, but stated for transparency.
Ear-verified on frame-matched replay renders of five real commercial recordings across four genres (indie rock, pop, alt-metal, electronic): an audible improvement over pooled-v4 on all of them, though subtler to the ear than the pooled-v4 → v4 step was — consistent with diminishing returns from a synthetic-only corpus at this size. Best in the lineage by both metric and ear; the remaining real-audio fidelity gap likely needs real-audio objectives (consistency training, LM-prior regularisation, reconstruction through the frozen generator) rather than more synthetic epochs.
Usage
Identical to the base model. Load with SimpleTuner's
minimax_music3_reference_adapter.py:
from minimax_music3_reference_adapter import MiniMaxMusic3ReferenceAdapter
adapter = MiniMaxMusic3ReferenceAdapter.from_files(
"rvq_encoder.safetensors", "rvq_encoder_config.json", "dav.pth")
codes = adapter.predict_codes(waveform, sample_rate) # [frames, 8]
dav.pth is the official DAV encoder from
MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-Music3.
Strict load_state_dict — the checkpoint keys match the base exactly.
Further training
training/rvq_distill_train.py is the self-contained trainer
used for this release: 8k-corpus zip layout, both consumption fixes above built in, warm start
from any encoder in this lineage, pure-soft or mixed soft/hard loss, learnable temperatures with
fold-at-save, holdout eval + best-checkpoint selection. Depends only on torch/numpy/safetensors
plus the reference adapter module for the model classes.
Credits
This encoder exists because of a chain of community work, each stage building on the last:
- MiniMax — MiniMax Music 3 and the DAV encoder. All weights and training data derive from it; use is subject to its terms.
- Serveurperso — the original community proof: a 41M single-GPU encoder demonstrating that exact token agreement was not required, and the first independent derivation of the stitched-timeline alignment contract.
- bghira / SimpleTuner — the encoder architecture (v1–v4, causal depth decoder), the reference adapter, the trainer, and the reverse-distillation trace corpus.
- Mothersuperior — the 8k distillation corpus with teacher top-50 distributions (which make this release's objective possible), and the pooled-v3/pooled-v4 fine-tunes this release warm-starts from.
- HOT-Step CPP — this release: the soft-distillation training run, the corpus consumption fixes, logit calibration, and the real-audio gate.
Use is subject to the MiniMax Music 3 model terms and the source datasets' terms.