TraceAV-Bench is the first benchmark for multi-hop trajectory reasoning over long audio-visual videos, showing top models reach only 51-68% accuracy with substantial room for improvement.
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Kimi-Audio Technical Report
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abstract
We present Kimi-Audio, an open-source audio foundation model that excels in audio understanding, generation, and conversation. We detail the practices in building Kimi-Audio, including model architecture, data curation, training recipe, inference deployment, and evaluation. Specifically, we leverage a 12.5Hz audio tokenizer, design a novel LLM-based architecture with continuous features as input and discrete tokens as output, and develop a chunk-wise streaming detokenizer based on flow matching. We curate a pre-training dataset that consists of more than 13 million hours of audio data covering a wide range of modalities including speech, sound, and music, and build a pipeline to construct high-quality and diverse post-training data. Initialized from a pre-trained LLM, Kimi-Audio is continual pre-trained on both audio and text data with several carefully designed tasks, and then fine-tuned to support a diverse of audio-related tasks. Extensive evaluation shows that Kimi-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance on a range of audio benchmarks including speech recognition, audio understanding, audio question answering, and speech conversation. We release the codes, model checkpoints, as well as the evaluation toolkits in https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-Audio.
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representative citing papers
HalluAudio is the first large-scale benchmark spanning speech, environmental sound, and music that uses human-verified QA pairs, adversarial prompts, and mixed-audio tests to measure hallucinations in large audio-language models.
Benign fine-tuning on audio data breaks safety alignment in Audio LLMs by raising jailbreak success rates up to 87%, with the dominant risk axis depending on model architecture and embedding proximity to harmful content.
VoxSafeBench reveals that speech language models recognize social norms from text but fail to apply them when acoustic cues like speaker or scene determine the appropriate response.
FlexiSLM is the first spoken language model supporting dynamic and controllable frame rates on speech input and output, outperforming fixed-rate 7B models at high quality and enabling faster inference at lower rates like 6.25 Hz.
FD-SLMs exhibit state inertia during abrupt interruptions that a training-free perception-vector steering intervention mitigates, lifting correctness from 28% to 45% and IWOR from 40% to 72% on the Zero-Buffer Benchmark.
AVI-Bench is a cognitively inspired benchmark that evaluates Omni-MLLMs on joint audio-visual tasks and reveals substantial limitations in current models.
SpeechEditBench provides seven atomic editing tasks, compositional multi-operation instructions, and an anchor-based protocol yielding target success, preservation success, and joint success metrics; evaluations show no model excels across dimensions and compositional editing is especially difficult
PolySpeech-100 is a new benchmark for native-level speech comprehension across 110 linguistic variants that evaluates 22 models and reports E2E advantages on dialects, robustness gaps on low-resource languages, and degradation from Chain-of-Thought prompting.
CBT-Audio dataset shows that adding audio input improves distress intensity estimation over transcripts alone for 8 of 10 audio language models, with clearest gains when verbal content and vocal delivery diverge.
AffectCodec is an emotion-guided neural speech codec that preserves emotional cues during quantization while maintaining semantic fidelity and prosodic naturalness.
Channel fusion gives better semantic grounding and QA performance in full-duplex LLM dialogue but is vulnerable to context corruption during interruptions, while cross-attention routing is more robust at the cost of weaker integration.
VITA-QinYu is the first expressive end-to-end spoken language model supporting role-playing and singing alongside conversation, trained on 15.8K hours of data and outperforming prior models on expressiveness and conversational benchmarks.
LWS is a text-first paradigm for full-duplex speech LLMs that treats visible writing as a primary output channel alongside audio input and spoken response, implemented via token schema and synthetic per-second annotations.
SpeechParaling-Bench is a new evaluation framework for paralinguistic-aware speech generation that reveals major limitations in current large audio-language models.
ICLAD combines in-context learning and comparison guidance in audio language models with a routing detector to boost generalization and explanations for audio deepfake detection, achieving up to 2x F1 gains on wild data.
ProVoice-Bench is the first framework to evaluate proactive voice agents, revealing that state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs struggle with over-triggering and context-aware reasoning.
AudioHijack generates imperceptible adversarial audio via gradient estimation, attention supervision, and reverberation blending to hijack 13 LALMs with 79-96% success on unseen contexts and real commercial agents.
HumDial-EIBench is a new benchmark using real human dialogues to evaluate audio language models on emotional intelligence tasks including multi-turn tracking, causal reasoning, empathy generation, and acoustic-semantic conflict resolution.
CapTalk unifies single-utterance and dialogue voice design via utterance- and speaker-level captions plus a hierarchical variational module for stable timbre with adaptive expression.
Speaker-Reasoner is an end-to-end speech LLM that iteratively analyzes audio structure, predicts temporal boundaries, and jointly models speaker identity, gender, timestamps, and transcription using a speaker-aware cache for long audio.
TiCo enables spoken dialogue models to follow explicit time constraints in generated responses using Spoken Time Markers and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, cutting duration error by 2.7x over its backbone.
M³KG-RAG improves multimodal reasoning in large language models by constructing multi-hop knowledge graphs and selectively pruning retrieved context with GRASP.
MECAT is a multi-expert benchmark for audio AI offering fine-grained captions and QA pairs generated via expert models and LLM reasoning, paired with the DATE metric that combines semantic similarity and cross-sample discriminability to favor detailed outputs.
citing papers explorer
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TraceAV-Bench: Benchmarking Multi-Hop Trajectory Reasoning over Long Audio-Visual Videos
TraceAV-Bench is the first benchmark for multi-hop trajectory reasoning over long audio-visual videos, showing top models reach only 51-68% accuracy with substantial room for improvement.
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HalluAudio: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Hallucination Detection in Large Audio-Language Models
HalluAudio is the first large-scale benchmark spanning speech, environmental sound, and music that uses human-verified QA pairs, adversarial prompts, and mixed-audio tests to measure hallucinations in large audio-language models.
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Benign Fine-Tuning Breaks Safety Alignment in Audio LLMs
Benign fine-tuning on audio data breaks safety alignment in Audio LLMs by raising jailbreak success rates up to 87%, with the dominant risk axis depending on model architecture and embedding proximity to harmful content.
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VoxSafeBench: Not Just What Is Said, but Who, How, and Where
VoxSafeBench reveals that speech language models recognize social norms from text but fail to apply them when acoustic cues like speaker or scene determine the appropriate response.
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FlexiSLM: A Dynamic and Controllable Frame Rate Spoken Language Model
FlexiSLM is the first spoken language model supporting dynamic and controllable frame rates on speech input and output, outperforming fixed-rate 7B models at high quality and enabling faster inference at lower rates like 6.25 Hz.
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Overcoming State Inertia in Full-Duplex Spoken Language Models via Activation Steering
FD-SLMs exhibit state inertia during abrupt interruptions that a training-free perception-vector steering intervention mitigates, lifting correctness from 28% to 45% and IWOR from 40% to 72% on the Zero-Buffer Benchmark.
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AVI-Bench: Toward Human-like Audio-Visual Intelligence of Omni-MLLMs
AVI-Bench is a cognitively inspired benchmark that evaluates Omni-MLLMs on joint audio-visual tasks and reveals substantial limitations in current models.
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SpeechEditBench: A Bilingual Multi-Attribute Benchmark for Instruction-Guided Speech Editing
SpeechEditBench provides seven atomic editing tasks, compositional multi-operation instructions, and an anchor-based protocol yielding target success, preservation success, and joint success metrics; evaluations show no model excels across dimensions and compositional editing is especially difficult
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PolySpeech-100: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Speech Understanding Across 100+ Languages and Dialects
PolySpeech-100 is a new benchmark for native-level speech comprehension across 110 linguistic variants that evaluates 22 models and reports E2E advantages on dialects, robustness gaps on low-resource languages, and degradation from Chain-of-Thought prompting.
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CBT-Audio: Evaluating Audio Language Models for Patient-Side Distress Intensity Estimation in CBT Session Recordings
CBT-Audio dataset shows that adding audio input improves distress intensity estimation over transcripts alone for 8 of 10 audio language models, with clearest gains when verbal content and vocal delivery diverge.
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AffectCodec: Emotion-Preserving Neural Speech Codec for Expressive Speech Modeling
AffectCodec is an emotion-guided neural speech codec that preserves emotional cues during quantization while maintaining semantic fidelity and prosodic naturalness.
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How Should LLMs Listen While Speaking? A Study of User-Stream Routing in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue
Channel fusion gives better semantic grounding and QA performance in full-duplex LLM dialogue but is vulnerable to context corruption during interruptions, while cross-attention routing is more robust at the cost of weaker integration.
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VITA-QinYu: Expressive Spoken Language Model for Role-Playing and Singing
VITA-QinYu is the first expressive end-to-end spoken language model supporting role-playing and singing alongside conversation, trained on 15.8K hours of data and outperforming prior models on expressiveness and conversational benchmarks.
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Liberating LLM Capabilities in Full-Duplex Speech Models
LWS is a text-first paradigm for full-duplex speech LLMs that treats visible writing as a primary output channel alongside audio input and spoken response, implemented via token schema and synthetic per-second annotations.
-
SpeechParaling-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Paralinguistic-Aware Speech Generation
SpeechParaling-Bench is a new evaluation framework for paralinguistic-aware speech generation that reveals major limitations in current large audio-language models.
-
ICLAD: In-Context Learning with Comparison-Guidance for Audio Deepfake Detection
ICLAD combines in-context learning and comparison guidance in audio language models with a routing detector to boost generalization and explanations for audio deepfake detection, achieving up to 2x F1 gains on wild data.
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From Reactive to Proactive: Assessing the Proactivity of Voice Agents via ProVoice-Bench
ProVoice-Bench is the first framework to evaluate proactive voice agents, revealing that state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs struggle with over-triggering and context-aware reasoning.
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Hijacking Large Audio-Language Models via Context-Agnostic and Imperceptible Auditory Prompt Injection
AudioHijack generates imperceptible adversarial audio via gradient estimation, attention supervision, and reverberation blending to hijack 13 LALMs with 79-96% success on unseen contexts and real commercial agents.
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HumDial-EIBench: A Human-Recorded Multi-Turn Emotional Intelligence Benchmark for Audio Language Models
HumDial-EIBench is a new benchmark using real human dialogues to evaluate audio language models on emotional intelligence tasks including multi-turn tracking, causal reasoning, empathy generation, and acoustic-semantic conflict resolution.
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CapTalk: Unified Voice Design for Single-Utterance and Dialogue Speech Generation
CapTalk unifies single-utterance and dialogue voice design via utterance- and speaker-level captions plus a hierarchical variational module for stable timbre with adaptive expression.
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Speaker-Reasoner: Scaling Interaction Turns and Reasoning Patterns for Timestamped Speaker-Attributed ASR
Speaker-Reasoner is an end-to-end speech LLM that iteratively analyzes audio structure, predicts temporal boundaries, and jointly models speaker identity, gender, timestamps, and transcription using a speaker-aware cache for long audio.
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TiCo: Time-Controllable Spoken Dialogue Model
TiCo enables spoken dialogue models to follow explicit time constraints in generated responses using Spoken Time Markers and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, cutting duration error by 2.7x over its backbone.
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M$^3$KG-RAG: Multi-hop Multimodal Knowledge Graph-enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation
M³KG-RAG improves multimodal reasoning in large language models by constructing multi-hop knowledge graphs and selectively pruning retrieved context with GRASP.
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MECAT: A Multi-Experts Constructed Benchmark for Fine-Grained Audio Understanding Tasks
MECAT is a multi-expert benchmark for audio AI offering fine-grained captions and QA pairs generated via expert models and LLM reasoning, paired with the DATE metric that combines semantic similarity and cross-sample discriminability to favor detailed outputs.
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An Efficient vLLM-Based Inference Pipeline for Unified Audio Understanding and Generation
Extends vLLM with delay-pattern de-interleaving, multi-stream sampling, and co-scheduled CFG to achieve 80% of non-CFG throughput for unified audio tasks while open-sourcing the pipeline.
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Preserving Speech-to-Text LLM Capabilities in Speech-to-Speech Generation
PRIME-Speech adds low-latency speech output to frozen S2T LLMs by synchronizing a causal post-decoder with intermediate hidden states and using mixed conditioning plus turn-level KV-cache packing, preserving original S2T performance across translation, QA, and dialogue tasks.
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Is Text All You Need? Text as a Universal Information Bottleneck for Speech LLMs
C-Gate represents speech frames as convex combinations of LLM token embeddings to enforce manifold compatibility, delivering up to 48.7% relative WER reduction on LibriSpeech while preserving emotion recognition accuracy.
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SpeakerCard-1M: An Evidence-Grounded Corpus for In-the-Wild Speaker Verification
SpeakerCard-1M supplies 56.7k evidence-grounded speaker cards, 1.78M captions, and new cross-modal protocols showing audio LMs lag a dual-encoder baseline on attribute-conditioned verification while joint training barely hurts standard EER.
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Hidden in Plain Tokens: Simply Robust, Gradient-Free Watermark for Synthetic Audio
A training-free audio watermarking method that reduces vocabulary via community detection to boost detection robustness by orders of magnitude while resisting audio modifications.
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Towards Large Model Feature Coding
LaMoFCBench is a new benchmark covering 4 categories and 16 scenarios that exposes misalignment between mainstream feature codecs and the heterogeneous statistics of large-model activations.
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Acoustic Interference: A New Paradigm Weaponizing Acoustic Latent Semantic for Universal Jailbreak against Large Audio Language Models
AIA generates universal interference audio infused with Acoustic Latent Semantics to bypass LALM safety alignment, achieving SOTA attack success rates on 10 models across five datasets.
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Towards Fine-Grained Multi-Dimensional Speech Understanding: Data Pipeline, Benchmark, and Model
A data pipeline, 14-dimension benchmark, and decoupled fine-tuning model are presented to advance fine-grained multi-dimensional speech understanding in LLMs.
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VocalParse: Towards Unified and Scalable Singing Voice Transcription with Large Audio Language Models
VocalParse applies interleaved and Chain-of-Thought prompting to a Large Audio Language Model to jointly transcribe lyrics, melody and word-note alignments, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple singing datasets.
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MoVE: Translating Laughter and Tears via Mixture of Vocalization Experts in Speech-to-Speech Translation
MoVE uses specialized LoRA expert adapters and a soft router to translate non-verbal vocalizations in S2ST, reproducing them in 76% of cases versus at most 14% for baselines while scoring highest on naturalness and emotional fidelity.
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Audio2Tool: Speak, Call, Act -- A Dataset for Benchmarking Speech Tool Use
Audio2Tool is a new benchmark dataset that shows speech models perform well on simple commands but degrade sharply on compositional tasks and realistic acoustic noise.
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SpotSound: Enhancing Large Audio-Language Models with Fine-Grained Temporal Grounding
SpotSound adds a hallucination-suppressing objective and a needle-in-haystack benchmark to audio-language models, reaching state-of-the-art temporal grounding while keeping general task performance.
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Bridging What the Model Thinks and How It Speaks: Self-Aware Speech Language Models for Expressive Speech Generation
SA-SLM uses variational information bottleneck for intent-aware bridging and self-criticism for realization-aware alignment to close the semantic-acoustic gap, outperforming open-source models and nearing GPT-4o-Audio expressiveness on EchoMind after training on 800 hours of data.
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Noise-Aware In-Context Learning for Hallucination Mitigation in ALLMs
NAICL reduces hallucination rates in ALLMs from 26.53% to 16.98% via noise priors in context and introduces the Clotho-1K benchmark with four hallucination types.
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Rethinking Entropy Allocation in LLM-based ASR: Understanding the Dynamics between Speech Encoders and LLMs
A multi-stage training method for LLM-based ASR uses new entropy allocation metrics to achieve competitive benchmark performance with 2.3B parameters while mitigating hallucinations via better encoder-LLM decoupling.
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HarmonicAttack: An Adaptive Cross-Domain Audio Watermark Removal
A black-box audio watermark removal attack trained on limited samples that generalizes across datasets and watermark schemes with high attack success rates.
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StableToken: A Noise-Robust Semantic Speech Tokenizer for Resilient SpeechLLMs
StableToken introduces a multi-branch architecture with bit-wise voting to create noise-robust semantic speech tokens, achieving lower Unit Edit Distance and better SpeechLLM robustness than prior single-path tokenizers.
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AU-Harness: An Open-Source Toolkit for Holistic Evaluation of Audio LLMs
AU-Harness introduces an efficient unified evaluation framework for audio LLMs featuring batch optimizations, multi-turn dialogue support, and standardized protocols for fair comparisons.
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Step-Audio 2 Technical Report
Step-Audio 2 integrates a latent audio encoder, reasoning-centric reinforcement learning, and discrete audio token generation into language modeling to deliver state-of-the-art performance on audio understanding and conversational benchmarks.
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LLaDA-V: Large Language Diffusion Models with Visual Instruction Tuning
LLaDA-V is a diffusion-based multimodal large language model that reaches competitive or state-of-the-art results on visual instruction tasks while using a non-autoregressive architecture.
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Exposure Bias Can Alleviate Itself via Directional and Frequency Rectification in Flow Matching
DEFAR rectifies exposure bias in Flow Matching by treating bias signals as adaptive feedback for directional correction and low-frequency compensation, outperforming baselines on CIFAR-10, CelebA-64, and ImageNet.
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Adaptive Turn-Taking for Real-time Multi-Party Voice Agents
ModeratorLM conditions a streaming speech LLM on assigned roles for adaptive turn-taking in multi-party settings, reporting over 40% higher precision and 70% higher recall than non-role baselines on real meetings and a new synthetic dataset.
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DuplexOmni: Real-Time Listening, Seeing, Thinking, and Speaking for Full-Duplex Interaction
DuplexOmni achieves real-time full-duplex multimodal interaction by separating an interaction layer from a pluggable thinking layer, supported by a Writer-Director pipeline for continuous-interaction training data.
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VoxCPM2 Technical Report
VoxCPM2 scales hierarchical continuous-latent speech modeling to 2B parameters and over 2M hours of multilingual data, unifying voice cloning, style control, and continuation in one backbone with open release.
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Sympatheia: Emotionally Adaptive Voice Assistant with Continuous Affect Conditioning
Sympatheia introduces a continuous affect-conditioned speech dialogue model and the Sympatheia-18k synthetic dataset, showing improved emotional appropriateness over baselines when speech cues are limited.
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A Survey of Large Audio Language Models: Generalization, Trustworthiness, and Outlook
A survey of Large Audio Language Models that establishes a taxonomy of trustworthiness vulnerabilities and proposes a Defense-in-Depth roadmap for audio intelligence.