Hearing Like Humans? Sound Symbolism and Perceptual Alignment in Speech Language Models
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The paper introduces AIB, the first benchmark of auditory perceptual illusion tasks designed for Large Audio Language Models (LALMs). It covers ten representative music, sound, and speech‑based illusory phenomena, each annotated for knowledge‑based priors, and evaluates models alongside controlled human listening studies. Results reveal that while LALMs are generally signal‑faithful on low‑level acoustic cues, some models show more human‑like responses when linguistic or musical priors are involved, yet none fully match human perceptual patterns.
The paper investigates whether joint language‑audio embedding models encode human perceptual timbre semantics. It evaluates several state‑of‑the‑art models, finding that LAION‑CLAP aligns best with human‑perceived timbre across instrumental sounds and descriptor‑conditioned audio effects, yet the overall alignment remains limited. The study also notes that reverb‑induced timbre semantics are more consistently captured than equalization‑induced ones.
arXiv:2606. 02642v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the success of audio-visual large-language models (LLMs), they can produce plausible but ungrounded outputs, termed hallucination.
arXiv:2502. 14671v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) representations are known to align with brain activity during language processing, but it remains unclear what drives this alignment.
The study compares human and vision‑language model (VLM) responses to cross‑modal association tasks, using identical stimuli (a pseudo‑word and two images) and recording both choices and eye movements. While larger VLMs show some alignment with human choices, their attention patterns correlate poorly with human gaze, performing no better than a simple center‑bias baseline. Fine‑tuning VLMs on human choices improves choice alignment but not attention alignment, and training on human gaze improves attention correlation without affecting choice accuracy.
arXiv:2606. 10147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can listen and see, but how do audio and visual signals actually travel through the network to shape an answer?