PARSA‑Bench is the first dedicated benchmark for evaluating large audio‑language models on Persian, addressing unique challenges such as classical poetry, traditional music, and code‑switching. It comprises 16 tasks—10 of which are new—covering speech understanding, paralinguistic analysis, and culturally grounded audio reasoning. Across most tasks, text‑only baselines outperform audio‑based models, indicating that audio understanding remains the main limitation, except for Persian poetry where prosody provides additional information that audio beats text.
By Mohammad Javad Ranjbar Kalahroodi, Mohammad Amini, Parmis Bathayan, Heshaam Faili, Azadeh Shakery
arXiv:2610.07902v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Cantonese lyric writing requires close alignment between lexical tones and melodic pitch. Existing melody-guided lyric generation methods typically rel...
By Shengyu Li, Jinting Wang, Li Liu
The evaluation of mathematical reasoning in large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on high-resource languages like English. This has created a significant barrier to the equitable development and deployment of AI in linguistically diverse regions such as Bangladesh, where over 230 million people speak Bengali.
arXiv:2606. 17391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-form serialized audio drama, with arcs that run for 200 to 800 episodes, is a major creative medium and a setting where frontier large language models (LLMs) fail.
By Logan Mann, Abdur Rahman, Mohammad Saifullah, Taaha Kazi, Vasu Sharma
MemeCULT-1K is a multilingual benchmark of 1,000 South Asian memes in Bengali, English, and Hindi, each paired with a cultural context note and three human-written explanations, plus an additional set of 54 Bengali regional dialect memes. The study evaluates thirteen vision‑language models under meme‑only and context‑aware settings, showing that providing minimal cultural context consistently improves performance across all models and languages. Error analysis indicates closed‑source models struggle with entity and reference misidentification, while open‑source models are limited by broader cultural knowledge gaps, especially in linguistic and phonological aspects.
By Tawsif Tashwar Dipto, Mehedi Ahamed, Radib Bin Kabir, Mueeze Al Mushabbir, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Mir Rayat Imtiaz Hossain, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Sabbir Ahmed
The study investigates cultural biases in large language models (LLMs) by testing their ability to perform author profiling—inferring singers’ gender and ethnicity—from song lyrics in a zero‑shot setting. Evaluating over 10,000 lyrics across several open‑source models, the authors find that most LLMs default toward North American ethnicity, while DeepSeek‑1.5B leans toward Asian ethnicity, and that Ministral‑8B exhibits the strongest ethnicity bias whereas Gemma‑12B is the most balanced. The paper introduces two fairness metrics, Modality Accuracy Divergence (MAD) and Recall Divergence (RD), to quantify these disparities and provides code and results publicly on GitHub and HuggingFace.
By Valentin Lafargue, Ariel Guerra-Adames, Emmanuelle Claeys, Elouan Vuichard, Jean-Michel Loubes
arXiv:2609.13291v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We present ScorePrompts, an interactive system in which users upload a score, receive natural-language descriptions of its musical structure, ask que...
By Emmanouil Karystinaios, Gerhard Widmer
arXiv:2608. 02486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-source LLMs reliably name Zeus, Jupiter, and Thor, but recover their counterparts in less-represented traditions like Finnish, Slavic, Egyptian, or Chinese mythology far less consistently.
By Iaroslav Chelombitko, Ekaterina Chelombitko, Mika H\"am\"al\"ainen
arXiv:2606. 08194v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) integrate audio perception and language understanding within a unified framework, enabling a wide range of real-world applications.
By Ryner Tan, Wenxuan Zhang
ONOTE is a unified framework that treats music as a scientifically structured domain of measurable cross-representation correspondences, focusing on omnimodal notation processing centered on sheet music. It introduces a test-only benchmark drawing from diverse musical sources—including staff, Jianpu, and tablature—across varied genres, instruments, and structural conditions, with aligned multimodal derivatives. The framework supports four complementary tasks—score understanding, notation conversion, audio transcription, and symbolic generation—while constructing a provenance-bearing proposition hypergraph from external music-theory materials for evidence retrieval and deterministic validity checks.
By Menghe Ma, Siqing Wei, Yuecheng Xing, Ziyue Zhu, Zhenghong Lin, Yaheng Wang, Fanhong Meng, Peijun Han, Luu Anh Tuan, Haoran Luo
MusTBench is a music‑expert‑validated benchmark that evaluates temporal grounding in Large Audio‑Language Models (LALMs) through five temporally grounded question‑answering tasks. The paper also introduces MusT, a four‑stage optimization recipe—music encoder adaptation, LLM adaptation, supervised fine‑tuning, and RL‑based optimization—to improve temporal grounding. Experiments show that current LALMs struggle with precise temporal grounding, while MusT yields significant improvements, highlighting temporal grounding as a key missing capability in these models.
By Daeyong Kwon, Qiyu Wu, Shinobu Kuriya, Junghyun Koo, Shuyang Cui, Zhi Zhong, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Hiromi Wakaki, Yuki Mitsufuji
The paper evaluates whether music‑text models truly capture fine‑grained musical meaning by introducing attribute‑swap perturbations that exchange properties such as timbre or order between instruments in a caption. Four contrastive models and one large audio‑language model were tested to see if they would score higher on the original caption than on the perturbed one. The results show that none of the contrastive models reliably distinguish the captions, and the audio‑language model’s advantage stems mainly from language priors, indicating that CLAP scores behave like a bag‑of‑words and fail to reflect attribute bindings.
By Yuan-Chiao Cheng, Alexander Lerch