When Models Hear What They Expect: Diagnosing Prosodic Heuristics in Multimodal Sarcasm Detection
Read the original on Hugging Face Trending Papers →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at Hugging Face Trending Papers.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at Hugging Face Trending Papers.
The study investigates how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) use prosodic cues in sarcasm detection. By testing Qwen2.5‑Omni and Qwen3‑Omni on Mandarin Chinese and English across five modality conditions, the authors find that adding audio increases false positives without improving true positives. Acoustic error analysis shows that models rely on a stereotypical prosodic pattern—elevated pitch and irregular pausing—that does not align with genuine sarcasm cues, and manipulating these dimensions alone can raise false positive rates up to 60%. The same effect appears in Gemini 3 Flash Preview, indicating the heuristic is not limited to a single architecture.
arXiv:2609.16582v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spoken sarcasm detectors may exploit lexical content, prosody, or their interaction, yet conventional evaluation cannot reveal which cues drive their...
arXiv:2606. 06168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present ProSarc, an audio-only framework that detects sarcasm by modelling temporal prosodic incongruity, that is, the mismatch between local prosodic dynamics and the utterance-level emotional baseline.
DEAF (Diagnostic Evaluation of Acoustic Faithfulness) is a benchmark comprising over 2,700 conflict stimuli that test Audio Multimodal Large Language Models (Audio MLLMs) across three acoustic dimensions: emotional prosody, background sounds, and speaker identity. The benchmark uses a controlled multi-level evaluation framework that gradually increases textual influence, from semantic conflicts to misleading prompts, to separate content-driven bias from prompt-induced sycophancy. Diagnostic metrics are introduced to measure how much models rely on textual cues versus acoustic signals, and an evaluation of seven Audio MLLMs shows that while models respond to acoustic variations, their predictions are largely driven by textual inputs, highlighting a gap between benchmark performance and true acoustic understanding.
arXiv:2608. 19942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal sarcasm detection aims to identify sarcastic intent from multimodal content, where inconsistencies between literal meaning and contextual cues often signal irony.
Multimodal sarcasm detection aims to identify sarcastic intent from multimodal content, where inconsistencies between literal meaning and contextual cues often signal irony. This task has attracted increasing research attention.