# SpeakerSleuth: Can Large Audio-Language Models Judge Speaker Consistency across Multi-turn Dialogues?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04029 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04029/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [ECAPA-TDNN: Emphasized Channel Attention, Propagation and Aggregation in TDNN Based Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07143/) (2020)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01743/) (2025)
- [Tacotron: Towards End-to-End Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10135/) (2017)
- [UTMOS: UTokyo-SaruLab System for VoiceMOS Challenge 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02152/) (2022)
- [CosyVoice: A Scalable Multilingual Zero-shot Text-to-speech Synthesizer based on Supervised Semantic Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05407/) (2024)
- [YourTTS: Towards Zero-Shot Multi-Speaker TTS and Zero-Shot Voice Conversion for everyone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02418/) (2021)
- [Audio Flamingo 3: Advancing Audio Intelligence with Fully Open Large Audio Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08128/) (2025)
- [CosyVoice 3: Towards In-the-wild Speech Generation via Scaling-up and Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17589/) (2025)
- [PromptTTS: Controllable Text-to-Speech with Text Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12171/) (2022)
- [FreeVC: Towards High-Quality Text-Free One-Shot Voice Conversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15418/) (2022)
- [DailyTalk: Spoken Dialogue Dataset for Conversational Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01063/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Analysis of the Effectiveness of Large Language Models as Automatic Dialogue Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15407/) (2023)
- [Audio Large Language Models Can Be Descriptive Speech Quality Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17202/) (2025)
- [Towards Controllable Speech Synthesis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06602/) (2024)
- [Long-Form Speech Generation with Spoken Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18603/) (2024)
- [MoonCast: High-Quality Zero-Shot Podcast Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14345/) (2025)
- [CoVoMix: Advancing Zero-Shot Speech Generation for Human-like Multi-talker Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06690/) (2024)
- [Enabling Auditory Large Language Models for Automatic Speech Quality Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16644/) (2024)
- [QualiSpeech: A Speech Quality Assessment Dataset with Natural Language Reasoning and Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20290/) (2025)
- [CoVoMix2: Advancing Zero-Shot Dialogue Generation with Fully Non-Autoregressive Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00885/) (2025)
- [Pay More Attention To Audio: Mitigating Imbalance of Cross-Modal Attention in Large Audio Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18816/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) as judges have emerged as a prominent approach for evaluating speech generation quality, yet their ability to assess speaker consistency across multi-turn dialogues remains unexplored. We present SpeakerSleuth, a benchmark evaluating whether LALMs can reliably judge speaker consistency across multi-turn dialogues through three tasks reflecting real-world requirements. We construct 1,818 human-verified evaluation instances across four diverse datasets spanning synthetic and real speech, with controlled acoustic difficulty. Evaluating twelve widely-used LALMs, we find that models struggle to reliably detect acoustic inconsistencies. For instance, given audio samples of the same speaker's turns, some models overpredict inconsistency, whereas others are overly lenient. Models further struggle to identify the exact turns that are problematic. When other interlocutors' turns are provided as textual context, performance degrades dramatically as models prioritize textual coherence over acoustic cues, failing to detect even obvious gender switches for a speaker. On the other hand, models perform substantially better in comparing and ranking acoustic variants, demonstrating inherent acoustic discrimination capabilities. These findings expose a significant bias in LALMs: they tend to prioritize text over acoustics, revealing fundamental modality imbalances that need to be addressed to build reliable audio-language judges. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/holi-lab/SpeakerSleuth.