Assessing Factual Music Comprehension in Large Audio Language Models

Large audio language models (LALMs) leverage multimodal representations to generate open-ended answers to natural language queries about audio. In this paper, we (1) provide empirical evidence that assessment of LALMs using the popular MusicQA dataset fails to measure whether a model's responses about music are factually correct, and (2) develop a new protocol for assessing the music comprehension capabilities of LALMs. Specifically, we propose an evaluation protocol that prompts a LALM for factually verifiable information, and parses its open-ended response into a structured format that can be objectively assessed using Precision, Recall, and F1 scores. Using this protocol, we define a benchmark consisting of six factual information retrieval tasks defined on three diverse datasets: MusicNet, the Free Music Archive, and OverClocked ReMix. We benchmark nine recent LALMs, including frontier models like Gemini and the latest open models like Music Flamingo, and release the suite of evaluation scripts at https://github.com/DCL2004/LALM-Eval to facilitate benchmarking of new LALMs.