Multi-Stage Music Source Restoration with BandSplit-RoFormer Separation and HiFi++ GAN

Abstract

Music Source Restoration (MSR) targets recovery of original, unprocessed instrument stems from fully mixed and mastered audio, where production effects and distribution artifacts violate common linear-mixture assumptions. This technical report presents the CP-JKU team’s system for the MSR ICASSP Challenge 2025. Our approach decomposes MSR into separation and restoration. First, a single BandSplit-RoFormer separator predicts eight stems plus an auxiliary other stem, and is trained with a three-stage curriculum that progresses from 4-stem warm-start fine-tuning (with LoRA) to 8-stem extension via head expansion. Second, we apply a HiFi++ GAN waveform restorer trained as a generalist and then specialized into eight instrument-specific experts.

Type
Publication
Technical report for the ICASSP 2026 Music Source Restoration (MSR) Challenge
Emmanouil Karystinaios
Emmanouil Karystinaios
Postdoctoral Researcher in Artificial Intelligence

My research interests include Music Information Retrieval, Music Generative models and Graph Neural Networks