arXiv AI June 11, 2026 By Chibuzor Okocha, Christan Grant

Afrispeech Semantics: Evaluating Audio Semantic Reasoning in Spoken Language Models Across Domains and Accents

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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

llms

arXiv AI

Sep 23

SEABED: SouthEast Asian Benchmark for Evaluating Audio Reasoning

arXiv:2609.22586v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern audio-language models are no longer judged only on what words they can transcribe, but on whether they can reason over what they hear: recover...

By Harshit Rajgarhia, Asif Shaik, Rachuri Lokesh, Sushanta Kumar Pani, Abhishek Mukherji

llms nlp benchmarks

arXiv AI

Aug 28

When Text Misleads: Inconsistent-Aware Reasoning for Audio-Grounded Dialogue

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

llms agents multimodal benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Sep 1

HEAR Who Said What: Unlocking Speaker-Attributed Reasoning via Counterfactual Voice Grounding

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

llms benchmarks

arXiv AI

Sep 23

Listen Then Reason: Perception-Grounded Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2609.23589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large audio-language models (LALMs) are increasingly used for a broader range of audio reasoning tasks. These models typically incorporate audio repr...

By Jiaheng Dong, Xiaofeng Yu, Jean Honorio, Abhirup Ghosh, Hong Jia, Ting Dang

llms reinforcement-learning multimodal benchmarks

arXiv AI

4d ago

Thinking in Depth, Speaking Directly: Recurrent Latent Reasoning for Paralinguistically Grounded Spoken Dialogue

arXiv:2609.37818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Empathetic spoken dialogue requires models to use both what is said and how it is said to decide how to respond. Explicit CoT can improve paralinguis...

By Shengbo Cai, Yuxiang Wang, Jingran Xie, Zhisheng Zhang, Shun Lei, Di Cao, Teddy Sun, Zhiyong Wu

llms fine-tuning efficiency benchmarks

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 18

Investigating Faithfulness in Large Audio Language Models

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

llms multimodal benchmarks safety

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Related stories

SEABED: SouthEast Asian Benchmark for Evaluating Audio Reasoning

When Text Misleads: Inconsistent-Aware Reasoning for Audio-Grounded Dialogue

HEAR Who Said What: Unlocking Speaker-Attributed Reasoning via Counterfactual Voice Grounding

Listen Then Reason: Perception-Grounded Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Large Audio-Language Models

Thinking in Depth, Speaking Directly: Recurrent Latent Reasoning for Paralinguistically Grounded Spoken Dialogue

Investigating Faithfulness in Large Audio Language Models