arXiv Computation and Language

Hearing the Order: Investigating Position Bias in Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 17

A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 17417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on a variety of audio understanding tasks but continue to struggle with temporal reasoning, a fundamental capability central to human auditory perception.

By Apoorva Kulkarni, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Sreyan Ghosh, Sarah Wiegreffe, Dinesh Manocha, Ramani Duraiswami
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Same Evidence, Different Answer: Auditing Order Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2606. 26079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) score each item on one canonical ordering and miss whether order-irrelevant shuffling changes the answer, a baseline reliability property called for by emerging AI evaluation guidelines.

By Akshay Paruchuri, Sanmi Koyejo, Ehsan Adeli
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Tracing Audio Grounding and Answer Selection in Audio LLMs

The paper investigates how Audio Large Language Models (Audio LLMs) actually use audio input to determine answers, rather than relying on textual cues. It finds that replacing audio with silence or unrelated audio degrades performance more after training than before, that acoustic information shapes representations in early-to-middle layers and influences final predictions in middle-to-late layers, and that training impacts specific layer bands most strongly. These observations offer a mechanistic view of how training enhances the use of acoustic evidence in Audio LLMs.

By Hyebin Cho, Suho Yoo, Jihoo Jung, Joon Son Chung
arXiv AI
Jun 30

ORCA: Open-ended Response Correctness Assessment for Audio Question Answering

arXiv:2512. 09066v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable assessment of the abilities of large audio language models (LALMs) is essential to advancing the state of the art.

By \v{S}imon Sedl\'a\v{c}ek, Sara Barahona, Bolaji Yusuf, Laura Herrera-Alarc\'on, Santosh Kesiraju, Cecilia Bola\~nos, Alicia Lozano-Diez, Sathvik Udupa, Fernando L\'opez, Allison Ferner, Ramani Duraiswami, Jan \v{C}ernock\'y