We are delighted to share that C4DM PhD student Ben Hayes, along with C4DM academics Charalampos Saitis and George Fazekas, have received the best student paper award at the ISMIR 2025 conference. The paper "Audio Synthesizer Inversion in Symmetric Parameter Spaces With Approximately Equivariant Flow Matching" proposes using permutation equivariant continuous normalizing flows to handle the ill-posed problem of audio synthesizer inversion, where multiple parameter configurations can produce identical sounds due to intrinsic symmetries in synthesizer design. By explicitly modeling these symmetries, particularly permutation invariance across repeated components like oscillators and filters, the method outperforms both regression-based approaches and symmetry-naive generative models on both synthetic tasks and a real-world synthesizer (Surge XT).
We are also happy to share that two C4DM PhD students, Yannis Vasilakis and Ben Hayes, were recognised as outstanding reviewers.