arXiv:2608.23758v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Recent large audio language models (LALMs) have achieved impressive progress in audio understanding. However, existing evaluations remain largely constrained to English and narrow audio domains. Prior benchmarks typically focus on a single audio modality, i.e., speech, sound, or music, limiting the systematic investigation into how these models generalize across diverse visual scenarios. In this paper, we introduce EXAM$^2$, a benchmark for multilingual and multimodal audio understanding spanning six languages and multiple modalities, including speech, sound, music, mixed-audio settings, and visual images. By incorporating visual information alongside heterogeneous audio inputs, EXAM$^2$ enables more realistic evaluation of scene-aware audio reasoning and cross-modal comprehension. EXAM$^2$ comprises $5,667$ multiple-choice questions, $22,614$ image instances, and $135,684$ multilingual translations. We evaluate state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LALMs as well as multimodal LLMs, revealing substantial performance gaps in multilingual and cross-modal understanding. Furthermore, we propose Gemma3n-EXAM$^2$, a lightweight fusion-model fine-tuned on EXAM$^2$-train, achieves up to $12.4\%$ improvement in multilingual settings and $21.7\%$ gains in multimodal evaluation over a strong baseline. Empirical results establish EXAM$^2$ as a challenging benchmark and pioneer future multilingual and multimodal audio intelligence research.
Abstract: Recent large audio language models (LALMs) have achieved impressive progress in audio understanding. However, existing evaluations remain largely constrained to English and narrow audio domains. Prior benchmarks typically focus on a single audio modality, i.e., speech, sound, or music, limiting the systematic investigation into how these models generalize across diverse visual scenarios. In this paper, we introduce EXAM$^2$, a benchmark for multilingual and multimodal audio understanding spanning six languages and multiple modalities, including speech, sound, music, mixed-audio settings, and visual images. By incorporating visual information alongside heterogeneous audio inputs, EXAM$^2$ enables more realistic evaluation of scene-aware audio reasoning and cross-modal comprehension. EXAM$^2$ comprises $5,667$ multiple-choice questions, $22,614$ image instances, and $135,684$ multilingual translations. We evaluate state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LALMs as well as multimodal LLMs, revealing substantial performance gaps in multilingual and cross-modal understanding. Furthermore, we propose Gemma3n-EXAM$^2$, a lightweight fusion-model fine-tuned on EXAM$^2$-train, achieves up to $12.4\%$ improvement in multilingual settings and $21.7\%$ gains in multimodal evaluation over a strong baseline. Empirical results establish EXAM$^2$ as a challenging benchmark and pioneer future multilingual and multimodal audio intelligence research.
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