arXiv Computation and Language

One Waveform, Two Stories: Benchmarking Speech-Acoustic Conflict in Audio-Language Models

The paper introduces SAC‑Bench, a benchmark of 616,031 audio clips that test audio‑language models (ALMs) on how they handle conflicts between spoken claims and acoustic evidence. It covers 188 sound‑event classes across seven semantic, temporal, and spatial tasks, pairing environmental recordings with either compatible or contradictory synthesized spoken claims and including audio‑only controls. Evaluation of five open‑weight ALMs shows that high audio‑only accuracy often coexists with significant drops in performance under conflicting claims, revealing gaps in conflict robustness and the mixed effects of prompt interventions.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

When Text Misleads: Inconsistent-Aware Reasoning for Audio-Grounded Dialogue

The paper introduces ContraTalk, a benchmark that tests whether dialogue models truly use acoustic cues or rely on transcript shortcuts. It formalizes cross‑modal disagreement, creates conflict and consistent QA examples, and proposes an Audio Twin representation to expose acoustic evidence to models. Experiments show that while text‑only LLMs perform well on consistent cases, they falter on conflict cases, and AudioLLMs only partially mitigate this issue.

By Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Yaohan Guan, Xiluo He, Jiarui Hai, Mingrui Liang, Kaavya Chaparala, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Najim Dehak, Jesus Villalba
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

MRMAD: A Multi-Round Multi-Audio Benchmark for Evaluating Acoustic Degradation Perception in Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2608.22236v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large audio-language models (LALMs) have shown promising progress in understanding speech, music, and general sound events, yet their ability...

By Yize Li, Ningyuan Yang, Sile Yin, Sindhuja Thogarrati, Sung-En Chang, Andrew C. Singer, Xue Lin, Chuan-Che Huang, Shuo Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

What Did the MLLM Hear? Token-Level Spectro-Temporal Grounding for Audio MLLM Explainability

The paper introduces STAG, a post‑hoc framework that provides token‑level spectro‑temporal grounding for captions produced by audio‑based multimodal large language models (MLLMs). STAG estimates temporal support for each token via vocabulary projections of encoded audio, measures frequency‑band relevance through controlled spectral occlusion, and fuses these signals into a spectro‑temporal relevance map. Evaluations across ten explanation methods and four grounding benchmarks show that STAG achieves superior event‑localization performance on every dataset, and counterfactual deletion experiments confirm that removing the identified evidence selectively reduces model confidence and often eliminates the corresponding event from regenerated captions.

By Lucia Cascone, Valeria Fraenza, Michele Nappi, Fabio Narducci, Benedetto Simone
arXiv AI
Sep 25

To Trust or Not to Trust: Retrieval-Augmented Fact Checking in Speech

The paper introduces VeriSpeak, a benchmark of 3,879 spoken claims for evaluating fact verification in Large Audio Language Models (LALMs). It shows a clear modality gap: models that verify written claims well often fail on spoken versions, and retrieval alone offers limited improvement. Combining retrieval with explicit reasoning yields the best performance, reaching 86.1% accuracy and demonstrating the need for grounded reasoning over retrieved evidence in speech misinformation detection.

By Debajyoti Mazumder, Mamta, Abhirama Subramanyam Penamakuri
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

Hear2Act: Benchmarking When Prosody Should Change What an Assistant Does

Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged. Yet existing benchmarks typically evaluate prosodic perception, response appropriateness, and task-oriented dialogue in isolation, making it difficult to test whether prosodic evidence changes downstream decisions.