Do Audio LLMs HEAR Pain? Tracing Acoustic Evidence from Speech to Language Reasoning
arXiv:2610.38570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large audio language models (LALMs) can process speech directly, but it remains unclear how well they use the non-lexical acoustic information that speech carries. We study this question through pain, using TAME-Pain, which contains pain-neutral Harvard sentences and spoken pain ratings recorded at different self-reported pain levels. We introduce HEAR, a four-stage diagnostic framework that traces pain-related information from the speech signal…