MMAU-Pro: A Challenging and Comprehensive Benchmark for Holistic Evaluation of Audio General Intelligence
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Cited by 21 in LLM reasoning, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.
Abstract (arXiv)
Audio comprehension-including speech, non-speech sounds, and music-is essential for achieving human-level intelligence. Consequently, AI agents must demonstrate holistic audio understanding to qualify as generally intelligent. However, evaluating auditory intelligence comprehensively remains challenging. To address this gap, we introduce MMAU-Pro, the most comprehensive and rigorously curated benchmark for assessing audio intelligence in AI systems. MMAU-Pro contains 5,305 instances, where each instance has one or more audios paired with human expert-generated question-answer pairs, spanning speech, sound, music, and their combinations. Unlike existing benchmarks, MMAU-Pro evaluates auditory intelligence across 49 unique skills and multiple complex dimensions, including long-form audio comprehension, spatial audio reasoning, multi-audio understanding, among others. All questions are meticulously designed to require deliberate multi-hop reasoning, including both multiple-choice and open-ended response formats. Importantly, audio data is sourced directly ``from the wild" rather than from existing datasets with known distributions. We evaluate 22 leading open-source and proprietary multimodal AI models, revealing significant limitations: even state-of-the-art models such as Gemini 2.5 Flash and Audio Flamingo 3 achieve only 59.2% and 51.7% accuracy, respectively, approaching random performance in multiple categories. Our extensive analysis highlights specific shortcomings and provides novel insights, offering actionable perspectives for the community to enhance future AI systems' progression toward audio general intelligence. The benchmark and code is available at https://sonalkum.github.io/mmau-pro.
Key facts. Cited by 61 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2025.
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 13; 2026: 48.
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- 2025Cognitive Foundations for Reasoning and Their Manifestation in LLMscited by 26
- 2025Audio MultiChallenge: A Multi-Turn Evaluation of Spoken Dialogue Systems on Natural Human Interactioncited by 19
- 2025Fun-Audio-Chat Technical Reportcited by 19
- 2026MMOU: A Massive Multi-Task Omni Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Long and Complex Real-World Videoscited by 14
- 2025STAR-Bench: Probing Deep Spatio-Temporal Reasoning as Audio 4D Intelligencecited by 11
- 2026MOSS-Audio Technical Reportcited by 11
- 2026VoxSafeBench: Not Just What Is Said, but Who, How, and Wherecited by 8
- 2026All That Glitters Is Not Audio: Rethinking Text Priors and Audio Reliance in Audio-Language Evaluationcited by 8
- 2026Do Audio LLMs Listen or Read? Analyzing and Mitigating Paralinguistic Failures with VoxParadoxcited by 7
- 2026AuTAgent: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Tool-Augmented Audio Reasoningcited by 6
- 2026The Interspeech 2026 Audio Reasoning Challenge: Evaluating Reasoning Process Quality for Audio Reasoning Models and Agentscited by 6
- 2026ParaBridge: Bridging Paralinguistic Perception and Dialogue Behavior in Speech Language Modelscited by 6
38 more
- 2025Hearing the Order: Investigating Position Bias in Large Audio-Language Modelscited by 5
- 2025Robustness assessment of large audio language models in multiple-choice evaluationcited by 5
- 2026OScaR: The Occam's Razor for Extreme KV Cache Quantization in LLMs and Beyondcited by 5
- 2025VCB Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for Audio-Grounded Large Language Model Conversational Agentscited by 4
- 2025The MUSE Benchmark: Probing Music Perception and Auditory Relational Reasoning in Audio LLMScited by 4
- 2026Bagpiper: Solving Open-Ended Audio Tasks via Rich Captionscited by 4
- 2026Generating Synthetic Doctor-Patient Conversations for Long-form Audio Summarizationcited by 4
- 2026Walking Through Uncertainty: An Empirical Study of Uncertainty Estimation for Audio-Aware Large Language Modelscited by 4
- 2026Realtime-Venus: A full-duplex interaction system with asynchronous delegationcited by 4
- 2026SEE: Signal Embedding Energy for Quantifying Noise Interference in Large Audio Language Modelscited by 3
- 2026AudioRouter: Data Efficient Audio Understanding via RL based Dual Reasoningcited by 3
- 2026Escape the Language Prior: Mitigating Late-Stage Modality Collapse in Audio Reasoning via Modality-Aware Policy Optimizationcited by 3
- 2026Audio-Zero: Label-Free Self-Evolution for Fine-Grained Audio Reasoningcited by 3
- 2025CMDAR: A Chinese Multi-scene Dynamic Audio Reasoning Benchmark with Diverse Challengescited by 2
- 2025Musical Score Understanding Benchmark: Evaluating Large Language Models' Comprehension of Complete Musical Scorescited by 2
- 2025ORCA: Open-ended Response Correctness Assessment for Audio Question Answeringcited by 2
- 2026SARA: Stress Test Reasoning in Audio Deepfake Detectioncited by 2
- 2026MUGEN: Evaluating and Improving Multi-audio Understanding of Large Audio-Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026Nudging Hidden States: Training-Free Model Steering for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Audio-Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026MedMosaic: A Challenging Large Scale Benchmark of Diverse Medical Audiocited by 2
- 2026A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026EvoAudio: Recursive Self-Improvement for Audio Understandingcited by 2
- 2026Thinking in Depth, Speaking Directly: Recurrent Latent Reasoning for Paralinguistically Grounded Spoken Dialoguecited by 2
- 2026Human or Machine? A Preliminary Turing Test for Speech-to-Speech Interactioncited by 1
- 2026PARSA-Bench: A Comprehensive Persian Audio-Language Model Benchmarkcited by 1
- 2026OmniJigsaw: Enhancing Omni-Modal Reasoning via Modality-Orchestrated Reorderingcited by 1
- 2026HeadRouter: Dynamic Head-Weight Routing for Task-Adaptive Audio Token Pruning in Large Audio Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026RAIL: Rethinking Auditory Intelligence in Large Audio-Language Models with a CHC-Grounded Benchmarkcited by 1
- 2026From Sounds to Scenes: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context-Aware Auditory Scene Understanding in Large Audio Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026AURAL: Adaptive Latent Reasoning with Joint Chunk for Speech Language Modelscited by 1
- 2025AU-Harness: An Open-Source Toolkit for Holistic Evaluation of Audio LLMscited by 0
- 2025Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Core Music Perception Taskscited by 0
- 2026BASS: Benchmarking Audio LMs for Musical Structure and Semantic Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026Benchmarking LLMs on the Massive Sound Embedding Benchmark (MSEB)cited by 0
- 2026PitchBench: Measuring Pitch Hearing in Audio-Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026KVoiceBench, KOpenAudioBench, and KMMAU: Agent-Driven Korean Speech Benchmarks for Evaluating SpeechLMscited by 0
- 2026Hearing Like Humans? Sound Symbolism and Perceptual Alignment in Speech Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Improving Text-to-Audio Instruction Following via Fine-Grained Feedback from Audio-Aware Large Language Modelscited by 0
50 most cited of 61 All 61 (JSON)
- 2026AdaLoop: Adaptive-Depth Latent Reasoning for Audio Language Models3 Oct 2026
- 2026AURAL: Adaptive Latent Reasoning with Joint Chunk for Speech Language Models1 Oct 2026
- 2026Thinking in Depth, Speaking Directly: Recurrent Latent Reasoning for Paralinguistically Grounded Spoken Dialogue29 Sep 2026
- 2026Almost Human, Except When It Matters: VoxParity and the Decisions a Voice Should Change28 Sep 2026
- 2026Do Audio LLMs Listen Before They Act? Diagnosing Acoustic-Context Gating in Voice Agents26 Sep 2026
- 2026EvoAudio: Recursive Self-Improvement for Audio Understanding23 Sep 2026
- 2026ParA-LLM: A Unified Approach to Paralinguistic and Acoustic Speech Understanding19 Sep 2026
- 2026SEABED: SouthEast Asian Benchmark for Evaluating Audio Reasoning18 Sep 2026
- 2026Samsone: A Family of Open Small Audio Language Models for On-Device Inference18 Sep 2026
- 2026Realtime-Venus: A full-duplex interaction system with asynchronous delegation12 Sep 2026
- 2026The Platonic brain bridge hypothesis: human brain networks as an architectural prior for multimodal large language models10 Sep 2026
- 2026HEAR Who Said What: Unlocking Speaker-Attributed Reasoning via Counterfactual Voice Grounding29 Aug 2026
38 more
- 2026Alignment Is All You Need: Instruction-Free Training for General Audio-Language Models28 Jul 2026
- 2026An Evaluation Framework for Structured Audio Captions Validated by Controlled Perturbations23 Jul 2026
- 2026Audio-Zero: Label-Free Self-Evolution for Fine-Grained Audio Reasoning22 Jul 2026
- 2026ESCUCHA: A Spanish Speech Benchmark for Heterogeneous Acoustic Conditions20 Jul 2026
- 2026Improving Text-to-Audio Instruction Following via Fine-Grained Feedback from Audio-Aware Large Language Models15 Jul 2026
- 2026Hearing Like Humans? Sound Symbolism and Perceptual Alignment in Speech Language Models11 Jul 2026
- 2026From Sounds to Scenes: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context-Aware Auditory Scene Understanding in Large Audio Language Models24 Jun 2026
- 2026A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models16 Jun 2026
- 2026RAIL: Rethinking Auditory Intelligence in Large Audio-Language Models with a CHC-Grounded Benchmark9 Jun 2026
- 2026ParaBridge: Bridging Paralinguistic Perception and Dialogue Behavior in Speech Language Models9 Jun 2026
- 2026MOSS-Audio Technical Report1 Jun 2026
- 2026KVoiceBench, KOpenAudioBench, and KMMAU: Agent-Driven Korean Speech Benchmarks for Evaluating SpeechLMs27 May 2026
- 2026Do Audio LLMs Listen or Read? Analyzing and Mitigating Paralinguistic Failures with VoxParadox26 May 2026
- 2026Escape the Language Prior: Mitigating Late-Stage Modality Collapse in Audio Reasoning via Modality-Aware Policy Optimization26 May 2026
- 2026PitchBench: Measuring Pitch Hearing in Audio-Language Models25 May 2026
- 2026OScaR: The Occam's Razor for Extreme KV Cache Quantization in LLMs and Beyond19 May 2026
- 2026Benchmarking LLMs on the Massive Sound Embedding Benchmark (MSEB)6 May 2026
- 2026MedMosaic: A Challenging Large Scale Benchmark of Diverse Medical Audio1 May 2026
- 2026Walking Through Uncertainty: An Empirical Study of Uncertainty Estimation for Audio-Aware Large Language Models28 Apr 2026
- 2026All That Glitters Is Not Audio: Rethinking Text Priors and Audio Reliance in Audio-Language Evaluation27 Apr 2026
- 2026HeadRouter: Dynamic Head-Weight Routing for Task-Adaptive Audio Token Pruning in Large Audio Language Models26 Apr 2026
- 2026VoxSafeBench: Not Just What Is Said, but Who, How, and Where16 Apr 2026
- 2026OmniJigsaw: Enhancing Omni-Modal Reasoning via Modality-Orchestrated Reordering9 Apr 2026
- 2026Generating Synthetic Doctor-Patient Conversations for Long-form Audio Summarization7 Apr 2026
- 2026Nudging Hidden States: Training-Free Model Steering for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Audio-Language Models15 Mar 2026
- 2026PARSA-Bench: A Comprehensive Persian Audio-Language Model Benchmark15 Mar 2026
- 2026MMOU: A Massive Multi-Task Omni Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Long and Complex Real-World Videos14 Mar 2026
- 2026MUGEN: Evaluating and Improving Multi-audio Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models10 Mar 2026
- 2026Human or Machine? A Preliminary Turing Test for Speech-to-Speech Interaction27 Feb 2026
- 2026The Interspeech 2026 Audio Reasoning Challenge: Evaluating Reasoning Process Quality for Audio Reasoning Models and Agents15 Feb 2026
- 2026AuTAgent: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Tool-Augmented Audio Reasoning14 Feb 2026
- 2026AudioRouter: Data Efficient Audio Understanding via RL based Dual Reasoning11 Feb 2026
- 2026Bagpiper: Solving Open-Ended Audio Tasks via Rich Captions5 Feb 2026
- 2026BASS: Benchmarking Audio LMs for Musical Structure and Semantic Reasoning3 Feb 2026
- 2026SEE: Signal Embedding Energy for Quantifying Noise Interference in Large Audio Language Models12 Jan 2026
- 2026SARA: Stress Test Reasoning in Audio Deepfake Detection7 Jan 2026
- 2025Fun-Audio-Chat Technical Report23 Dec 2025
- 2025Audio MultiChallenge: A Multi-Turn Evaluation of Spoken Dialogue Systems on Natural Human Interaction16 Dec 2025
50 newest of 61 All 61 (JSON)
- 2025Cognitive Foundations for Reasoning and Their Manifestation in LLMscited by 26
- 2026MMOU: A Massive Multi-Task Omni Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Long and Complex Real-World Videoscited by 14
- 2025STAR-Bench: Probing Deep Spatio-Temporal Reasoning as Audio 4D Intelligencecited by 11
- 2026All That Glitters Is Not Audio: Rethinking Text Priors and Audio Reliance in Audio-Language Evaluationcited by 8
- 2026AuTAgent: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Tool-Augmented Audio Reasoningcited by 6
- 2026The Interspeech 2026 Audio Reasoning Challenge: Evaluating Reasoning Process Quality for Audio Reasoning Models and Agentscited by 6
- 2025The MUSE Benchmark: Probing Music Perception and Auditory Relational Reasoning in Audio LLMScited by 4
- 2026AudioRouter: Data Efficient Audio Understanding via RL based Dual Reasoningcited by 3
- 2026Escape the Language Prior: Mitigating Late-Stage Modality Collapse in Audio Reasoning via Modality-Aware Policy Optimizationcited by 3
- 2026Audio-Zero: Label-Free Self-Evolution for Fine-Grained Audio Reasoningcited by 3
- 2025CMDAR: A Chinese Multi-scene Dynamic Audio Reasoning Benchmark with Diverse Challengescited by 2
- 2026SARA: Stress Test Reasoning in Audio Deepfake Detectioncited by 2
12 most cited of 21 All 21 (JSON)
- 2026AdaLoop: Adaptive-Depth Latent Reasoning for Audio Language Models3 Oct 2026
- 2026AURAL: Adaptive Latent Reasoning with Joint Chunk for Speech Language Models1 Oct 2026
- 2026SEABED: SouthEast Asian Benchmark for Evaluating Audio Reasoning18 Sep 2026
- 2026HEAR Who Said What: Unlocking Speaker-Attributed Reasoning via Counterfactual Voice Grounding29 Aug 2026
- 2026Audio-Zero: Label-Free Self-Evolution for Fine-Grained Audio Reasoning22 Jul 2026
- 2026A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models16 Jun 2026
- 2026RAIL: Rethinking Auditory Intelligence in Large Audio-Language Models with a CHC-Grounded Benchmark9 Jun 2026
- 2026Escape the Language Prior: Mitigating Late-Stage Modality Collapse in Audio Reasoning via Modality-Aware Policy Optimization26 May 2026
- 2026MedMosaic: A Challenging Large Scale Benchmark of Diverse Medical Audio1 May 2026
- 2026All That Glitters Is Not Audio: Rethinking Text Priors and Audio Reliance in Audio-Language Evaluation27 Apr 2026
- 2026Nudging Hidden States: Training-Free Model Steering for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Audio-Language Models15 Mar 2026
- 2026MMOU: A Massive Multi-Task Omni Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Long and Complex Real-World Videos14 Mar 2026
12 newest of 21 All 21 (JSON)
- 2025VCB Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for Audio-Grounded Large Language Model Conversational Agentscited by 4
- 2026KVoiceBench, KOpenAudioBench, and KMMAU: Agent-Driven Korean Speech Benchmarks for Evaluating SpeechLMscited by 0
- 2026Do Audio LLMs Listen Before They Act? Diagnosing Acoustic-Context Gating in Voice Agentscited by 0
- 2026Do Audio LLMs Listen Before They Act? Diagnosing Acoustic-Context Gating in Voice Agents26 Sep 2026
- 2026KVoiceBench, KOpenAudioBench, and KMMAU: Agent-Driven Korean Speech Benchmarks for Evaluating SpeechLMs27 May 2026
- 2025VCB Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for Audio-Grounded Large Language Model Conversational Agents13 Oct 2025
- 2025Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Core Music Perception Taskscited by 0
- 2026Alignment Is All You Need: Instruction-Free Training for General Audio-Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026The Platonic brain bridge hypothesis: human brain networks as an architectural prior for multimodal large language modelscited by 0
- 2026The Platonic brain bridge hypothesis: human brain networks as an architectural prior for multimodal large language models10 Sep 2026
- 2026Alignment Is All You Need: Instruction-Free Training for General Audio-Language Models28 Jul 2026
- 2025Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Core Music Perception Tasks25 Oct 2025
- 2026EvoAudio: Recursive Self-Improvement for Audio Understanding23 Sep 2026
- 2025Audio MultiChallenge: A Multi-Turn Evaluation of Spoken Dialogue Systems on Natural Human Interactioncited by 19
- 2025Fun-Audio-Chat Technical Reportcited by 19
- 2026MOSS-Audio Technical Reportcited by 11
- 2026VoxSafeBench: Not Just What Is Said, but Who, How, and Wherecited by 8
- 2026Do Audio LLMs Listen or Read? Analyzing and Mitigating Paralinguistic Failures with VoxParadoxcited by 7
- 2026ParaBridge: Bridging Paralinguistic Perception and Dialogue Behavior in Speech Language Modelscited by 6
- 2025Hearing the Order: Investigating Position Bias in Large Audio-Language Modelscited by 5
- 2025Robustness assessment of large audio language models in multiple-choice evaluationcited by 5
- 2026Bagpiper: Solving Open-Ended Audio Tasks via Rich Captionscited by 4
- 2026Generating Synthetic Doctor-Patient Conversations for Long-form Audio Summarizationcited by 4
- 2026Walking Through Uncertainty: An Empirical Study of Uncertainty Estimation for Audio-Aware Large Language Modelscited by 4
- 2026Realtime-Venus: A full-duplex interaction system with asynchronous delegationcited by 4
12 most cited of 30 All 30 (JSON)
- 2026Thinking in Depth, Speaking Directly: Recurrent Latent Reasoning for Paralinguistically Grounded Spoken Dialogue29 Sep 2026
- 2026Almost Human, Except When It Matters: VoxParity and the Decisions a Voice Should Change28 Sep 2026
- 2026ParA-LLM: A Unified Approach to Paralinguistic and Acoustic Speech Understanding19 Sep 2026
- 2026Samsone: A Family of Open Small Audio Language Models for On-Device Inference18 Sep 2026
- 2026Realtime-Venus: A full-duplex interaction system with asynchronous delegation12 Sep 2026
- 2026An Evaluation Framework for Structured Audio Captions Validated by Controlled Perturbations23 Jul 2026
- 2026ESCUCHA: A Spanish Speech Benchmark for Heterogeneous Acoustic Conditions20 Jul 2026
- 2026Hearing Like Humans? Sound Symbolism and Perceptual Alignment in Speech Language Models11 Jul 2026
- 2026From Sounds to Scenes: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context-Aware Auditory Scene Understanding in Large Audio Language Models24 Jun 2026
- 2026ParaBridge: Bridging Paralinguistic Perception and Dialogue Behavior in Speech Language Models9 Jun 2026
- 2026MOSS-Audio Technical Report1 Jun 2026
- 2026Do Audio LLMs Listen or Read? Analyzing and Mitigating Paralinguistic Failures with VoxParadox26 May 2026
12 newest of 30 All 30 (JSON)