MiniMaestro: Resource-Conscious Conversational Music Recommendation with a Single Open-Weight 8B Model
The RecSys Challenge 2026 Music-CRS (TalkPlay) task formalizes this as two coupled sub-problems: given dialogue history and user context, retrieve a ranked list of the top-20 tracks from the full, unrestricted catalog, and generate a response that justifies the recommendation while sustaining conversational coherence.