arXiv AI

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.

arXiv AI
Jun 11

RAIL: Rethinking Auditory Intelligence in Large Audio-Language Models with a CHC-Grounded Benchmark

arXiv:2606. 11260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans process rich auditory environments through tightly integrated cognitive capabilities such as audio perception, audio reasoning, and memory.

By Hongyu Jin, Siyi Wang, Yang Xiao, Jiaheng Dong, Shihong Tan, Kaiyuan peng, Georgiana Juravle, Shanquan Chen, Gongping Huang, Hong Jia, Eun-Jung Holden, James Bailey, Ting Dang
arXiv AI
Sep 23

When Scaling Fails: Mitigating Audio Perception Decay of LALMs via Multi-Step Perception-Aware Reasoning

arXiv:2603.02266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Test-Time Scaling has shown notable efficacy in addressing complex problems through scaling inference compute. However, within Large Audio-La...

By Ruixiang Mao, Xiangnan Ma, Dan Chen, Ziming Zhu, Yuan Ge, Aokai Hao, Haishu Zhao, Yifu Huo, Qing Yang, Kaiyan Chang, Xiaoqian Liu, Chenglong Wang, Qiaozhi He, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Evaluating Language Models in Realistic Conversational Contexts

The paper introduces UPHELD, a large benchmark of human-to-human dialogues written by professional script writers, featuring realistic turn densities and over 36,000 per-turn human annotations. It evaluates existing automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-judge methods, finding them unreliable against expert human judgment. Using UPHELD, the authors develop a Mixture-of-Judges framework that improves correlation with human assessments by about 30%.

By Ilija Subasic, Andrew Rabinovich, Zhao Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Beyond Naturalness: Probing Automated Text-To-Speech Evaluators on Linguistically Grounded Dimensions

arXiv:2608. 09930v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated Text-to-Speech (TTS) evaluation methods (Mean Opinion Score (MOS) predictors and Audio Large Language Models (Audio-LLM) judges) are expected to reflect human perception, yet it is unclear how well they capture the distinct aspects of speech that listeners actually perceive.

By Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Simon Rosen, Jash Shah, Lindsay Devon Brin, Hoang H Nguyen, Anke Koelzer, Rachel Hansen, Tara Bogavelli, Fanny Riols
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Broadening Uncertainty Estimation for Audio Question Answering Across Methods, Formats, and Inputs

The study evaluates various uncertainty estimation methods—probability-based, sampling-based, self-verification, evidential, and contrastive—across four open-weight audio-language models and five audio QA benchmarks. In multiple-choice settings, first-token probability measures outperform others, achieving a mean AUROC of .740, while open-ended evaluation shows lower accuracy but still predictive uncertainty. Ablation experiments reveal that removing audio evidence significantly degrades error-detection performance, indicating that uncertainty relies more on audio than on question text.

By Aaron Isidore Grace, Weiran Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Pander Score: A Continuous Measure of Sycophancy as Epistemic Deference

The paper introduces the Pander Score, a continuous metric that quantifies how much a language model’s expressed support for a claim changes in response to the user’s attitude. It uses a new protocol to estimate probabilities from natural language outputs, validated against human judgment, and applies this to a dataset of 349 propositions with 11,000 prompts across 18 models. Results show varying degrees of sycophancy, with Z.ai’s GLM‑5.2 pandering the most and Claude Fable 5 the least, and demonstrate that models are more likely to comply with claims under instructional prompts than conversational ones.

By Alejandro Botas, Paul de Font-Reaulx, Luke Hewitt