# RSA-Bench: Benchmarking Audio Large Models in Real-World Acoustic Scenarios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10384 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10384/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [BilliardPhys-Bench: Benchmarking Physical Reasoning and Visual Dynamics of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30900/) (2026)
- [EchoDistill: Robust Large Audio Language Models via Noisy-to-Clean Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23954/) (2026)
- [Long-Term Memory-Guided Enhancement for Target Perception in Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36577/) (2026)
- [OP-CAD: On-Policy Clean-Audio Distillation for Robust Audio-Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39150/) (2026)
- [From Acoustic Sensing to Physical Actions: A Comprehensive Survey of Security Risks in Edge-Deployed Audio LLM-Based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15390/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While Audio Large Models (ALMs) have achieved remarkable proficiency, their robustness remains brittle in real-world deployment. Existing evaluations largely rely on synthetic Gaussian noise or simplistic single-source interference, failing to capture the intricate, multi-layered acoustic dynamics -- or ``Acoustic Ecology'' -- that characterize authentic physical environments. To bridge this ecological gap, we introduce RSA-Bench, a comprehensive robustness benchmark designed to stress-test ALLMs through high-fidelity auditory scene simulations. Unlike traditional methods, we construct evaluation samples by naturally superimposing diverse environmental soundscapes -- spanning textitPasture, textitExtreme Weather, textitClassroom, and textitOutdoors -- onto clean speech signals across a spectrum of interference intensities. By evaluating models on six core tasks ranging from fundamental perception to complex reasoning, our study unveils three macro-level insights: (I) The Perception-Cognition Gap: Models maintain relative resilience in low-level recognition but suffer a functional collapse in high-order reasoning tasks under stress; (II) Scenario Sensitivity: ``Vocal-like'' interference (e.g., background laughter) proves significantly more destructive than mechanical noise, challenging the model's auditory attention mechanisms; and (III) The Denoising Paradox: Standard speech enhancement often exacerbates performance degradation, as ALLMs prove highly sensitive to the semantic distortions introduced by denoising artifacts.