DEAF: A Benchmark for Diagnostic Evaluation of Acoustic Faithfulness in Audio Language Models
arXiv:2603.18048v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent Audio Multimodal Large Language Models (Audio MLLMs) demonstrate impressive performance on speech benchmarks, yet it remains unclear whether these models genuinely process acoustic signals or rely on text-based semantic inference. To systematically study this question, we introduce DEAF (Diagnostic Evaluation of Acoustic Faithfulness), a benchmark of over 2,700 conflict stimuli spanning three acoustic dimensions: emotional prosody, back…