In this paper, we propose a hybrid Neural Collaborative Filtering (NCF) model trained with a multi-objective function to achieve a music playlist generation system. The proposed approach focuses particularly on the cold-start problem (playlists with no seed tracks) and uses a text encoder employing a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to exploit textual information given by the playlist title. To accelerate the training, we first apply Weighted Regularized Matrix Factorization (WRMF) as the basic recommendation model to prelearn latent factors of playlists and tracks. These factors then feed into the proposed multi-objective optimization that also involves embeddings of playlist titles. The experimental study indicates that the proposed approach can effectively suggest suitable music tracks for a given playlist title, compensating poor original recommendation results made on empty playlists by the WRMF model.@en

The automated recognition of music genres from audio information is a challenging problem, as genre labels are subjective and noisy. Artist labels are less subjective and less noisy, while certain artists may relate more strongly to certain genres. At the same time, at prediction time, it is not guaranteed that artist labels are available for a given audio segment. Therefore, in this work, we propose to apply the transfer learning framework, learning artist-related information which will be used at inference time for genre classification. We consider different types of artist-related information, expressed through artist group factors, which will allow for more efficient learning and stronger robustness to potential label noise. Furthermore, we investigate how to achieve the highest validation accuracy on the given FMA dataset, by experimenting with various kinds of transfer methods, including single-task transfer, multi-task transfer and finally multi-task learning.@en