arXiv Machine Learning

Clean Accuracy Does Not Guarantee Provenance Robustness: A Prospective Codec-Stress Evaluation of Audio Attribution

The study evaluates audio provenance attribution systems, showing that high clean‑benchmark accuracy does not translate to robustness after codec compression. Using a prospectively registered protocol, the authors measured closed‑set attribution performance on two corpora after single‑stage codec transport, finding significant degradation—up to 70.3 Macro‑F1 points for WavLM‑Base+ and 61.0 for W2V2‑BERT 2.0—depending on codec settings and representation. The results demonstrate that clean accuracy alone cannot guarantee deployment robustness across different codecs and representations.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

Half-Truth Audio Detection and Localisation: A Lightweight Cross-Attentive Architecture and a Cross-Corpus Diagnostic Study

The paper introduces CAFNet, a lightweight cross‑attentive neural network that fuses MFCC, LFCC, and Chroma‑STFT features to detect and localise partially manipulated (half‑truth) speech. CAFNet achieves high ternary accuracy (97.55%) and low boundary mean absolute error (0.037 s) on the MLADDC benchmark, while demonstrating that cross‑corpus transfer depends on both capability and corpus characteristics. Ablation studies show that cross‑attention fusion is the most critical component, and removing a deeply supervised auxiliary head improves in‑domain performance and reduces variance.

By S. Sutharya, Remya K. Sasi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Auditing Generative Audio Calls for Known-Task Audio-LLM Evaluatio

The paper investigates how to evaluate generative audio large language models (Audio‑LLMs) on known closed‑set tasks by separating the decision to call a generative model from the use of acoustic evidence. It introduces a controlled call‑decision framework where a policy can choose between a transcript label, encoder evidence from CLAP, AST, or WavLM, or a generative call to Qwen2‑Audio, Qwen2.5‑Omni, or MOSS‑Audio, and measures the impact of generative calls on accuracy. Results on the VocalSound dataset show that while transcript‑only accuracy is low (0.296), encoder‑based controls achieve high accuracy (≈0.85) without any generative calls, and adding generative calls yields only a marginal improvement (0.925 vs. 0.921).

By Mengzhe Geng
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Auditing Generative Audio Calls for Known-Task Audio-LLM Evaluation

The paper investigates how to evaluate audio‑language models by separating the use of acoustic evidence from the need to invoke a generative audio model. Using a controlled call‑decision framework, the authors compare policies that rely on transcript labels, encoder outputs from CLAP, AST, or WavLM, and optional calls to generative models such as Qwen2‑Audio, Qwen2.5‑Omni, or MOSS‑Audio. Results on the VocalSound dataset show that while transcript‑only accuracy is low (0.296), encoder‑only controls achieve high accuracy (≈0.85) without any generative calls, and adding generative calls yields only a marginal improvement (0.925 vs. 0.921).

By Mengzhe Geng
arXiv AI
Sep 7

PRISM-Bench: An Audio-Centric Diagnostic Benchmark for Text-to-Audio-Video Generation

PRISM‑Bench is an audio‑centric diagnostic benchmark for text‑to‑audio‑video generation, built from 900 human‑verified samples. It evaluates audio along two axes—audio type (speech, music, sound) and sound‑source visibility (on‑screen vs. off‑screen)—across four perceptual dimensions (audio‑visual coherence, audio quality, audio expressiveness, and prompt following) using 35 fine‑grained criteria. The benchmark employs an enhanced MLLM‑as‑a‑Judge protocol that aligns strongly with human raters, revealing a performance gap between frontier and open‑source T2AV models and highlighting overfitting to perceptual fidelity while struggling with complex grounding and control tasks, especially for music and synchronized on‑screen audio.

By Yuchen Sun, Qian Yang, Jun Wang, Detai Xin, Guoqiao Yu, Guanglu Wan, Qi Jia
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Correlation-Guided Encoder Selection for Multi-Encoder Large Audio-Language Models

The paper introduces CUES, a lightweight heuristic for selecting encoder combinations in large audio‑language models by estimating complementarity through Pearson correlations of single‑encoder performance profiles. Using a frozen SmolLM2‑135M backbone, CUES consistently identifies optimal encoder sets for each track on the XARES‑LLM benchmark without requiring fusion training or test data. On broad audio tasks, CUES selects a diverse trio of encoders, improving performance by 4.3% over Whisper‑medium, while on text generation it opts for a focused speech‑only pair, outperforming mHuBERT‑147 by 6.3%. The results illustrate how correlation signals guide a diversity–interference trade‑off across different task families.

By Pei-Jun Liao, Hung-Shin Lee, Wenze Ren, Kuo-Hsuan Hung, Hung-yi Lee, Hsin-Min Wang