The paper introduces ContraTalk, a benchmark that tests whether dialogue models truly use acoustic cues or rely on transcript shortcuts. It formalizes cross‑modal disagreement, creates conflict and consistent QA examples, and proposes an Audio Twin representation to expose acoustic evidence to models. Experiments show that while text‑only LLMs perform well on consistent cases, they falter on conflict cases, and AudioLLMs only partially mitigate this issue.
By Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Yaohan Guan, Xiluo He, Jiarui Hai, Mingrui Liang, Kaavya Chaparala, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Najim Dehak, Jesus Villalba
Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have been widely used as judge models for the automatic evaluation of generated speech. However, prior approaches predominantly focus on holistic naturalness, leaving fine-grained paralinguistic distinctions underexplored.
arXiv:2509. 22363v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) integrate audio encoders with pretrained Large Language Models to perform complex multimodal reasoning tasks.
By Pooneh Mousavi, Lovenya Jain, Mirco Ravanelli, Cem Subakan
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
The paper introduces STAG, a post‑hoc framework that provides token‑level spectro‑temporal grounding for captions produced by audio‑based multimodal large language models (MLLMs). STAG estimates temporal support for each token via vocabulary projections of encoded audio, measures frequency‑band relevance through controlled spectral occlusion, and fuses these signals into a spectro‑temporal relevance map. Evaluations across ten explanation methods and four grounding benchmarks show that STAG achieves superior event‑localization performance on every dataset, and counterfactual deletion experiments confirm that removing the identified evidence selectively reduces model confidence and often eliminates the corresponding event from regenerated captions.
By Lucia Cascone, Valeria Fraenza, Michele Nappi, Fabio Narducci, Benedetto Simone
arXiv:2606. 11219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio language models (ALMs) are increasingly used for speech-based understanding, yet their ability to perform semantic reasoning beyond transcription, Text-to-Audio Retrieval, Captioning, and Question-Answering accuracy remains insufficiently benchmarked.
By Chibuzor Okocha, Christan Grant
The paper investigates whether audio‑language models capture paralinguistic cues beyond spoken content. Using the Expresso dataset and four open‑source models, the authors trace how speaking style information is encoded in the late layers of the audio encoder but is degraded before reaching the final output. They find that some models are content‑driven while others are acoustic‑driven, revealing a gap between what is encoded and what is utilized in current audio‑language models.
By Bhuvan Koduru, Dareen Safar B Alharthi, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj
arXiv:2609.35952v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We introduce HEAR (Human-recorded Evaluation of Audio-LLM bias by Real speakers), a large-scale, ecologically valid benchmark comprising 87k real hum...
By Shen Yan, Duc Le, Irina-Elena Veliche
arXiv:2608.29120v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Speech Language Models (SLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-speaker environments, yet their ability to attribute speech to the correct speaker a...
By Dongwook Lee, Sangkwon Park, Eunwoo Song, Che Hyun Lee, Youngho Cho, Junho Kim, June Young Yi, Heeseung Kim, Sungroh Yoon
arXiv:2608. 19936v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Public benchmarks are important measures of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model capabilities.
By Theo Lebryk, David Ayllon, Alice Baird, Jakub Piotr C{\l}apa, Jens Madsen, Panagiotis Tzirakis
arXiv:2609.06011v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Omni-modal large language models (OLLMs) jointly process vision, audio, and text, yet their modality bias under cross-modal conflict remains underexp...
By Yen-Ting Piao, Shu-Yun Chen, Chin-Hui Chu, Chun-Wei Chen, Shih-Yun Shan Kuan, Hung-yi Lee, Yun-Nung Chen
The paper evaluates four Contrastive Decoding (CD) strategies for Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) and finds that Audio-Aware Decoding and Audio Contrastive Decoding are the most effective. Their performance varies across models, largely depending on the baseline error profile: CD reliably fixes errors where models incorrectly claim no audio or rely on uncertainty-driven guessing, but struggles with flawed reasoning or confident misassertions. A token-level analysis shows that CD’s suppression targets hesitation markers, explaining its limited impact on confident errors.
By Tzu-Quan Lin, Wei-Ping Huang, Yi-Cheng Lin, Hung-yi Lee