EXAM$^2$ is a new benchmark for audio understanding that covers six languages and multiple modalities—speech, sound, music, mixed-audio, and visual images—providing 5,667 multiple-choice questions, 22,614 image instances, and 135,684 multilingual translations. It evaluates large audio language models (LALMs) and multimodal large language models (LLMs), revealing significant gaps in multilingual and cross‑modal performance. The authors also introduce Gemma3n-EXAM$^2$, a lightweight fusion model that improves multilingual results by up to 12.4% and multimodal results by 21.7% over a strong baseline.
By Jiawen Wang, Xiaoxue Gao, Zi Haur Pang, Nancy F. Chen
SONIC‑O1 is a new benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models on audio‑video understanding. It contains 60 hours of 231 clips across 13 real‑world conversational domains, with 4,958 human‑verified annotations and demographic metadata. The benchmark tests open‑ended summarization, multiple‑choice question answering, and temporally grounded reasoning, revealing performance gaps between model families and across demographic groups.
By Ahmed Y. Radwan, Christos Emmanouilidis, Hina Tabassum, Deval Pandya, Shaina Raza
arXiv:2607. 10299v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large-scale multimodal models have drivenremarkable progress in vision-language tasks; however, comprehensiveomni-modal understanding remains under-explored, largely due to thescarcity of datasets with rich, explicitly aligned auditory cues.
By Kaiying Yan, Luoyi Sun, Xiao Zhou, Weidi Xie
AVMeme Exam is a human‑curated benchmark featuring over a thousand iconic Internet audio‑visual clips—including speech, songs, music, and sound effects—each paired with a unique Q&A that probes understanding from surface content to context, emotion, usage, and world knowledge. The benchmark also provides metadata such as original year, transcript, summary, and sensitivity. Evaluations of state‑of‑the‑art multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and human participants reveal that current models perform poorly on textless music and sound effects and struggle to think in cultural and contextual terms compared to surface content.
By Xilin Jiang, Qiaolin Wang, Junkai Wu, Xiaomin He, Zhongweiyang Xu, Yinghao Ma, Minshuo Piao, Kaiyi Yang, Xiuwen Zheng, Riki Shimizu, Yicong Chen, Arsalan Firoozi, Gavin Mischler, Sukru Samet Dindar, Richard Antonello, Linyang He, Tsun-An Hsieh, Xulin Fan, Yulun Wu, Yuesheng Ma, Chaitanya Amballa, Weixiong Chen, Jiarui Hai, Ruisi Li, Vishal Choudhari, Cong Han, Yinghao Aaron Li, Adeen Flinker, Mounya Elhilali, Emmanouil Benetos, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Romit Roy Choudhury, Nima Mesgarani
arXiv:2507. 19634v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models have laid the foundation for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), which unify text, speech, and vision within a single framework.
By Sara Papi, Maike Z\"ufle, Marco Gaido, Beatrice Savoldi, Danni Liu, Ioannis Douros, Luisa Bentivogli, Jan Niehues
The paper introduces Omni-Interactive Universal Embedder (OmniUE), a unified embedding framework that learns a single representation space for text, video, and audio using learnable tokens and intermediate-layer representations. OmniUE supports omni-interactive querying, allowing users to input text, visual regions, or audio spans, which are processed by segmenters and an omni-LLM to generate user-conditioned embeddings. The authors evaluate OmniUE on the new OmniCHOIR benchmark and other multimodal tasks, reporting significant performance gains over state‑of‑the‑art baselines across textual, audio, and visual interactive settings.
By Wei-Yao Wang, Kazuya Tateishi, Shuyang Cui, Christian Simon, Takashi Shibuya, Shusuke Takahashi, Yuki Mitsufuji
OmniReasoning introduces a new benchmark, OmniReasoningBench, that requires both audio and visual evidence for answering 1,150 multiple-choice and open-ended questions across two tasks. The authors also develop OmniQA, a data engine that automatically generates evidence‑grounded QA pairs with time‑stamped clue chains, producing training datasets OmniReasoning‑SFT‑112K and OmniReasoning‑RL‑19K. Finally, they propose Modality‑Factored Self‑Distillation (MFSD), an on‑policy self‑distillation method that assigns token‑level credit by evaluating responses under modality‑specific clue contexts, enabling the OmniReasoning‑30B‑A3B model to achieve significant performance gains on both the new benchmark and existing video benchmarks.
By Junming Lin, Yuxuan Wang, Zhenxin Lei, Yuxin Liu, Ruixun Liu, Yinsong Yan, Ling Wang, Minghao Han, Yunfei Chu, Shun Lei, Xueyao Zhang, Qize Yang, Jin Xu, Yiwu Zhong
arXiv:2608. 09227v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Omnimodal language models (OLMs) enable unified audio-visual understanding, but processing long joint token sequences makes inference computationally prohibitive.
By Puneet Mathur, Manan Suri, Dinesh Manocha
arXiv:2606. 14591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have shown strong performance on a wide range of audio understanding tasks, yet they still struggle with complex audio reasoning.
By Hui Geng, Yi Su, Han Yin, Tianjiao Wan, Qisheng Xu, Jiaxin Chen, Zijian Gao, Hengzhu Liu, Xie Chen, Kele Xu
arXiv:2511. 23304v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Scene Graph with Kolmogorov-Arnold Expert Network for Audio-Visual Question Answering (SHRIKE).
By Zijian Fu, Changsheng Lv, Xianlin Zhang, Mengshi Qi, Huadong Ma
Omnimodal language models (OLMs) enable unified audio-visual understanding, but processing long joint token sequences makes inference computationally prohibitive. While recent token compression methods attempt to alleviate this burden, compressing modalities in isolation often destroys the temporal cross-modal anchors necessary for coherent reasoning.
arXiv:2603. 09714v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While multi-audio understanding is critical for large audio-language models (LALMs), it remains underexplored.
By Chih-Kai Yang, Yun-Shao Tsai, Yu-Kai Guo, Ping-Le Tsai, Yen-Ting Piao, Hung-Wei Chen, Ting-Lin Hsiao, Yun-Man Hsu, Ke-Han Lu, Hung-yi Lee