mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Audio MultiChallenge: A Multi-Turn Evaluation of Spoken Dialogue Systems on Natural Human Interaction

arXiv 2512.14865 ↗First posted 16 Dec 2025cs.SD cs.CL cs.LGcited by 18

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end (E2E) spoken dialogue systems are increasingly replacing cascaded pipelines for voice-based human-AI interaction, processing raw audio directly without intermediate transcription. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate these models on synthetic speech and single-turn tasks, leaving realistic multi-turn conversational ability underexplored. We introduce Audio MultiChallenge, an open-source benchmark to evaluate E2E spoken dialogue systems under natural multi-turn interaction patterns. Building on the text-based MultiChallenge framework, which evaluates Inference Memory, Instruction Retention, and Self Coherence, we introduce a new axis Voice Editing that tests robustness to mid-utterance speech repairs and backtracking. We further augment each axis to the audio modality, such as introducing Audio-Cue challenges for Inference Memory that require recalling ambient sounds and paralinguistic signals beyond semantic content. We curate 452 conversations from 47 speakers with 1,712 instance-specific rubrics through a hybrid audio-native agentic and human-in-the-loop pipeline that exposes model failures at scale while preserving natural disfluencies found in unscripted human speech. Our evaluation of proprietary and open-source models reveals that even frontier models struggle on our benchmark, with Gemini 3 Pro Preview (Thinking), our highest-performing model achieving a 54.65% pass rate. Error analysis shows that models fail most often on our new axes and that Self Coherence degrades with longer audio context. These failures reflect difficulty of tracking edits, audio cues, and long-range context in natural spoken dialogue. Audio MultiChallenge provides a reproducible testbed to quantify them and drive improvements in audio-native multi-turn interaction capability.

Key facts. Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 40 of its 52 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2025.

Builds on

40 of 52 references.

References · 40

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  2. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
  3. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,467
  4. 2022Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervisioncited by 3,972
  5. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
  6. 2018UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reductioncited by 2,841
  7. 2021HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Unitscited by 2,301
  8. 2022Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Themcited by 1,767
  9. 2025Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Reportcited by 704
  10. 2024Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialoguecited by 536
  11. 2023SpeechGPT: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Cross-Modal Conversational Abilitiescited by 518
  12. 2025Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAscited by 491
28 more
  1. 2017Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesiscited by 487
  2. 2025Qwen3-Omni Technical Reportcited by 451
  3. 2025LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversationcited by 400
  4. 2025HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Healthcited by 385
  5. 2024Self-Preference Bias in LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 248
  6. 2025Kimi-Audio Technical Reportcited by 210
  7. 2024VoiceBench: Benchmarking LLM-Based Voice Assistantscited by 192
  8. 2025MultiChallenge: A Realistic Multi-Turn Conversation Evaluation Benchmark Challenging to Frontier LLMscited by 171
  9. 2025Audio Flamingo 2: An Audio-Language Model with Long-Audio Understanding and Expert Reasoning Abilitiescited by 127
  10. 2022Generative Spoken Dialogue Language Modelingcited by 125
  11. 2024AudioBench: A Universal Benchmark for Audio Large Language Modelscited by 124
  12. 2025MMAR: A Challenging Benchmark for Deep Reasoning in Speech, Audio, Music, and Their Mixcited by 113
  13. 2024WavChat: A Survey of Spoken Dialogue Modelscited by 88
  14. 2024Recent Advances in Speech Language Models: A Surveycited by 85
  15. 2025ResearchRubrics: A Benchmark of Prompts and Rubrics For Evaluating Deep Research Agentscited by 80
  16. 2025MMAU-Pro: A Challenging and Comprehensive Benchmark for Holistic Evaluation of Audio General Intelligencecited by 59
  17. 2024DeSTA2: Developing Instruction-Following Speech Language Model Without Speech Instruction-Tuning Datacited by 43
  18. 2025Oolong: Evaluating Long Context Reasoning and Aggregation Capabilitiescited by 33
  19. 2025LFM2 Technical Reportcited by 31
  20. 2025Beyond Seeing: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs on Tool-Enabled Image Perception, Transformation, and Reasoningcited by 28
  21. 2025Speech-IFEval: Evaluating Instruction-Following and Quantifying Catastrophic Forgetting in Speech-Aware Language Modelscited by 27
  22. 2025ProfBench: Multi-Domain Rubrics requiring Professional Knowledge to Answer and Judgecited by 21
  23. 2025AudioMarathon: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Long-Context Audio Understanding and Efficiency in Audio LLMscited by 19
  24. 2025MTalk-Bench: Evaluating Speech-to-Speech Models in Multi-Turn Dialogues via Arena-style and Rubrics Protocolscited by 14
  25. 2025Closing the Gap Between Text and Speech Understanding in LLMscited by 14
  26. 2025BLAB: Brutally Long Audio Benchcited by 11
  27. 2025StressTest: Can YOUR Speech LM Handle the Stress?cited by 6
  28. 2025Chain-of-Thought Training for Open E2E Spoken Dialogue Systemscited by 5

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 18.

18 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2026τ-Voice: Benchmarking Full-Duplex Voice Agents on Real-World Domainscited by 30
  2. 2026Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learningcited by 18
  3. 2026X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMscited by 13
  4. 2026Not Every Rubric Teaches Equally: Policy-Aware Rubric Rewards for RLVRcited by 9
  5. 2026Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation: Post-Training Without Rubric Verifierscited by 9
  6. 2026EchoChain: A Full-Duplex Benchmark for State-Update Reasoning Under Interruptionscited by 4
  7. 2026MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMscited by 3
  8. 2026MTVA-Bench: Evaluating the Language Model Inside Cascaded Voice Agentscited by 3
  9. 2026MSI-Bench: Evaluating Multi-Speaker Voice Interaction for Collaborative AI Agentscited by 3
  10. 2026MP-Bench: Evaluating Voice Agents as a Multiparty Conversation Participantcited by 2
  11. 2026Qwen3.8-Omni: Towards Native Omni-Modal Agentscited by 2
  12. 2026From Awareness to Adherence: Bridging the Context Gap in Spoken Dialogue Systems via Context-Aware Decodingcited by 1
6 more
  1. 2026Multi-turn Conversational AI from Text to Multimodal Interaction: Data, Models, Evaluation, and Open Challengescited by 1
  2. 2026Qwen-Audio-3.1-Realtime: Towards Reliable Agentic Voice Interactioncited by 1
  3. 2026S3-Bench: Evaluating Speech Interaction Models as Scientific Voice Assistantscited by 0
  4. 2026SteerDuplex: Steerable Duplex Speech Dialogue Modelscited by 0
  5. 2026RoleBreak: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Role-Playing Robustness in Spoken Dialoguecited by 0
  6. 2026SCB: SpeechConversationBench for Evaluating Multi-Turn Reasoning in Speech-to-Speech Modelscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025VoiceAssistant-Eval: Benchmarking AI Assistants across Listening, Speaking, and Viewing
  2. 2026Talk2Agent: Benchmarking Voice Interfaces for Text Agents
  3. 2026SpeechGym: An Audio-Native Gym for Training Voice Agents via Reinforcement Learning
  4. 2026Multi-Faceted Interactivity Alignment in Full-Duplex Speech Models
  5. 2026SDiaReward: Modeling and Benchmarking Spoken Dialogue Rewards with Modality and Colloquialness
  6. 2026Optimizing Conversational Quality in Spoken Dialogue Systems with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback
  7. 2025MARS-Bench: A Multi-turn Athletic Real-world Scenario Benchmark for Dialogue Evaluation
  8. 2026SpeechEQ: Benchmarking Emotional Intelligence Quotient in Socially Aware Voice Conversational Models