arXiv Machine Learning

RA-QA: A Benchmarking System for Respiratory Audio Question Answering Under Real-World Heterogeneity

arXiv:2602. 18452v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As conversational multimodal AI tools are increasingly adopted to process patient data for health assessment, robust benchmarks are needed to measure progress and expose failure modes under realistic conditions.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

From Sound to Symptom: Real-Time Respiratory Signal Understanding for Conversational Healthcare Agents

The paper introduces HealthCUES, a real‑time streaming pipeline that extracts and analyzes cough and throat‑clearing events from live spoken conversations. It detects coughs within sub‑second latency, distinguishes cough subtypes (dry, wet, barking, whooping), differentiates coughing from throat clearing, and estimates temporal boundaries, all while gating alerts based on conversational context. The system, built on Qwen3Omni, achieves high accuracy (93% F1 for cough detection) and low latency (340 ms) and has been validated by healthcare professionals for telehealth use.

By Tanmay Laud, Herprit Mahal, Subhabrata Mukherjee
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

The Bairong System for MLC-SLM 2026: Dynamic Question-Aware Evidence Routing for Multilingual Conversational Speech Understanding

arXiv:2609.22214v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long multilingual conversational spoken question answering requires systems to balance long-range transcript semantics with sparse acoustic and speaker...

By Shangkun Huang, Junchao Hu, Huan Shen, Guoji Wang, Yingao Wang, Shaosai Li, Wei Zou, Yunzhang Chen
arXiv AI
2d ago

SONIC-O1: A Real-World Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Audio-Video Understanding

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 AI
Aug 26

EXAM$^2$: $\underline{Ex}tending$ $\underline{A}udio$ $Understanding$ $in$ $\underline{M}ultilingual$ $and$ $\underline{M}ultimodal$ $Analysis$

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

DocTalkBN: A Novel Dataset of Expert Telemedicine Conversations in Bengali

DocTalkBN is a large-scale multimodal dataset of authentic expert telemedicine conversations in Bengali, comprising 557.63 hours of paired audio and text, 1,515 multi-turn patient calls, and 10,274 host–doctor question–answer exchanges across 26 medical specialties. The dataset contains 1.7 million tokens and preserves the spontaneity and contextual richness of real medical interactions in a low-resource language. Three downstream tasks—medical triage classification, advice safety evaluation, and medical named entity recognition—are constructed to benchmark large language models and encoder-based baselines, demonstrating DocTalkBN’s practical usefulness for clinically grounded reasoning.

By Anik Saha, Fahmida Sultana Naznin, Sadatul Islam Sadi, Ananya Shahrin Promi, Wahid Al Azad Navid, Rifat Shahriyar
arXiv AI
Sep 7

MMTClinic: Multimodal, Multilingual Time Series Question Answering and Reasoning Benchmark for Clinical Domain

MMTClinic is a new benchmark that tests large language models on complex reasoning and question‑answering tasks involving clinical time‑series data. It combines text, medical images, and multivariate physiological signals to create 30,000 QA pairs—including 15,000 multiple‑choice and 15,000 open‑ended questions—in five languages (English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Tamil). The benchmark covers mortality prediction, heart‑rate forecasting, and SOFA score estimation, and evaluates 13 state‑of‑the‑art LLMs across zero‑shot, few‑shot, and chain‑of‑thought settings, revealing significant performance gaps across tasks, languages, and modalities.

By Sourav Malakar, Harshit Nigam, Akash Ghosh, Sriparna Saha, Amlan Chakrabarti, Saptarsi Goswami, Priti Singh