Audio MultiChallenge: A Multi-Turn Evaluation of Spoken Dialogue Systems on Natural Human Interaction
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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.
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 18.
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- 2026τ-Voice: Benchmarking Full-Duplex Voice Agents on Real-World Domainscited by 30
- 2026Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learningcited by 18
- 2026X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMscited by 13
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- 2026EchoChain: A Full-Duplex Benchmark for State-Update Reasoning Under Interruptionscited by 4
- 2026MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMscited by 3
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- 2026MP-Bench: Evaluating Voice Agents as a Multiparty Conversation Participantcited by 2
- 2026Qwen3.8-Omni: Towards Native Omni-Modal Agentscited by 2
- 2026From Awareness to Adherence: Bridging the Context Gap in Spoken Dialogue Systems via Context-Aware Decodingcited by 1
6 more
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- 2026SteerDuplex: Steerable Duplex Speech Dialogue Modelscited by 0
- 2026RoleBreak: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Role-Playing Robustness in Spoken Dialoguecited by 0
- 2026SCB: SpeechConversationBench for Evaluating Multi-Turn Reasoning in Speech-to-Speech Modelscited by 0
- 2026SCB: SpeechConversationBench for Evaluating Multi-Turn Reasoning in Speech-to-Speech Models30 Sep 2026
- 2026Qwen3.8-Omni: Towards Native Omni-Modal Agents22 Sep 2026
- 2026Qwen-Audio-3.1-Realtime: Towards Reliable Agentic Voice Interaction21 Sep 2026
- 2026MSI-Bench: Evaluating Multi-Speaker Voice Interaction for Collaborative AI Agents21 Sep 2026
- 2026MTVA-Bench: Evaluating the Language Model Inside Cascaded Voice Agents17 Sep 2026
- 2026RoleBreak: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Role-Playing Robustness in Spoken Dialogue15 Sep 2026
- 2026MP-Bench: Evaluating Voice Agents as a Multiparty Conversation Participant11 Sep 2026
- 2026SteerDuplex: Steerable Duplex Speech Dialogue Models11 Sep 2026
- 2026S3-Bench: Evaluating Speech Interaction Models as Scientific Voice Assistants9 Sep 2026
- 2026Multi-turn Conversational AI from Text to Multimodal Interaction: Data, Models, Evaluation, and Open Challenges18 Aug 2026
- 2026From Awareness to Adherence: Bridging the Context Gap in Spoken Dialogue Systems via Context-Aware Decoding15 Jun 2026
- 2026Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation: Post-Training Without Rubric Verifiers10 Jun 2026
6 more
- 2026Not Every Rubric Teaches Equally: Policy-Aware Rubric Rewards for RLVR19 May 2026
- 2026Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning12 May 2026
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- 2026τ-Voice: Benchmarking Full-Duplex Voice Agents on Real-World Domains14 Mar 2026
- 2026X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMs6 Mar 2026
- 2026MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMs3 Feb 2026
- 2026τ-Voice: Benchmarking Full-Duplex Voice Agents on Real-World Domainscited by 30
- 2026MTVA-Bench: Evaluating the Language Model Inside Cascaded Voice Agentscited by 3
- 2026Qwen3.8-Omni: Towards Native Omni-Modal Agentscited by 2
- 2026Qwen-Audio-3.1-Realtime: Towards Reliable Agentic Voice Interactioncited by 1
- 2026Qwen3.8-Omni: Towards Native Omni-Modal Agents22 Sep 2026
- 2026Qwen-Audio-3.1-Realtime: Towards Reliable Agentic Voice Interaction21 Sep 2026
- 2026MTVA-Bench: Evaluating the Language Model Inside Cascaded Voice Agents17 Sep 2026
- 2026τ-Voice: Benchmarking Full-Duplex Voice Agents on Real-World Domains14 Mar 2026
- 2026Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learningcited by 18
- 2026Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning12 May 2026
- 2026X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMscited by 13
- 2026Not Every Rubric Teaches Equally: Policy-Aware Rubric Rewards for RLVRcited by 9
- 2026Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation: Post-Training Without Rubric Verifierscited by 9
- 2026EchoChain: A Full-Duplex Benchmark for State-Update Reasoning Under Interruptionscited by 4
- 2026MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMscited by 3
- 2026MSI-Bench: Evaluating Multi-Speaker Voice Interaction for Collaborative AI Agentscited by 3
- 2026MP-Bench: Evaluating Voice Agents as a Multiparty Conversation Participantcited by 2
- 2026From Awareness to Adherence: Bridging the Context Gap in Spoken Dialogue Systems via Context-Aware Decodingcited by 1
- 2026Multi-turn Conversational AI from Text to Multimodal Interaction: Data, Models, Evaluation, and Open Challengescited by 1
- 2026SteerDuplex: Steerable Duplex Speech Dialogue Modelscited by 0
- 2026RoleBreak: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Role-Playing Robustness in Spoken Dialoguecited by 0
- 2026SCB: SpeechConversationBench for Evaluating Multi-Turn Reasoning in Speech-to-Speech Modelscited by 0
- 2026SCB: SpeechConversationBench for Evaluating Multi-Turn Reasoning in Speech-to-Speech Models30 Sep 2026
- 2026MSI-Bench: Evaluating Multi-Speaker Voice Interaction for Collaborative AI Agents21 Sep 2026
- 2026RoleBreak: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Role-Playing Robustness in Spoken Dialogue15 Sep 2026
- 2026MP-Bench: Evaluating Voice Agents as a Multiparty Conversation Participant11 Sep 2026
- 2026SteerDuplex: Steerable Duplex Speech Dialogue Models11 Sep 2026
- 2026Multi-turn Conversational AI from Text to Multimodal Interaction: Data, Models, Evaluation, and Open Challenges18 Aug 2026
- 2026From Awareness to Adherence: Bridging the Context Gap in Spoken Dialogue Systems via Context-Aware Decoding15 Jun 2026
- 2026Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation: Post-Training Without Rubric Verifiers10 Jun 2026
- 2026Not Every Rubric Teaches Equally: Policy-Aware Rubric Rewards for RLVR19 May 2026
- 2026EchoChain: A Full-Duplex Benchmark for State-Update Reasoning Under Interruptions8 Apr 2026
- 2026X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMs6 Mar 2026
- 2026MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMs3 Feb 2026
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