# RAIL: Rethinking Auditory Intelligence in Large Audio-Language Models with a CHC-Grounded Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11260 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11260/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio-language model reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 31 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Audio-language model reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/audio-language-model-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07919/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-Audio Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10759/) (2024)
- [SALMONN: Towards Generic Hearing Abilities for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13289/) (2023)
- [Qwen3-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17765/) (2025)
- [MMAU: A Massive Multi-Task Audio Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19168/) (2024)
- [Pengi: An Audio Language Model for Audio Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11834/) (2023)
- [AIR-Bench: Benchmarking Large Audio-Language Models via Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07729/) (2024)
- [Audio Flamingo: A Novel Audio Language Model with Few-Shot Learning and Dialogue Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01831/) (2024)
- [Qwen3.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15804/) (2026)
- [Audio Flamingo 2: An Audio-Language Model with Long-Audio Understanding and Expert Reasoning Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03983/) (2025)
- [AudioBench: A Universal Benchmark for Audio Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16020/) (2024)
- [MMAR: A Challenging Benchmark for Deep Reasoning in Speech, Audio, Music, and Their Mix](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13032/) (2025)
- [WavLLM: Towards Robust and Adaptive Speech Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00656/) (2024)
- [Step-Audio 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16632/) (2025)
- [MMSU: A Massive Multi-task Spoken Language Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04779/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Speech Large Language Models for Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18908/) (2024)
- [MMAU-Pro: A Challenging and Comprehensive Benchmark for Holistic Evaluation of Audio General Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13992/) (2025)
- [Omni-R1: Do You Really Need Audio to Fine-Tune Your Audio LLM?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09439/) (2025)
- [SAKURA: On the Multi-hop Reasoning of Large Audio-Language Models Based on Speech and Audio Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13237/) (2025)
- [Step-Audio-R1 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15848/) (2025)
- [AudioMarathon: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Long-Context Audio Understanding and Efficiency in Audio LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07293/) (2025)
- [SpeechR: A Benchmark for Speech Reasoning in Large Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02018/) (2025)
- [BLAB: Brutally Long Audio Bench](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03054/) (2025)
- [STAR-Bench: Probing Deep Spatio-Temporal Reasoning as Audio 4D Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24693/) (2025)
- [The MUSE Benchmark: Probing Music Perception and Auditory Relational Reasoning in Audio LLMS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19055/) (2025)
- [DIFFA-2: A Practical Diffusion Large Language Model for General Audio Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23161/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [AMemOps: Evaluating Memory Updates in Long Audio Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18652/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humans process rich auditory environments through various cognitive capabilities such as audio perception, audio reasoning and memory. Despite recent progress in large audio-language models (LALMs), current evaluation remains largely task- or domain-centric, focusing on end performance while ignoring underlying auditory cognitive behaviors. This gap between how auditory cognition is understood in humans and how it is evaluated in LALMs hinders the interpretation of model behaviour in underlying capabilities and limits alignment with human auditory objectives. We introduce RAIL, a human-centric benchmark grounded in the Cattell--Horn--Carroll (CHC) framework, which formalises auditory cognition into five core capabilities, and develops them into structured evaluation tasks with principled data curation and human-aligned evaluation protocols. Evaluating 26 LALMs reveals strong performance in knowledge-related tasks but weak auditory perception and memory, reflecting reliance on language-based pretraining. Limited reasoning under auditory settings further suggests a mismatch between existing training paradigms and human-like auditory reasoning, as well as over-reasoning at the cost of efficiency. Six LALMs exceed human performance in general, while auditory processing all lags behind human. Overall, RAIL establishes a new framework for human-aligned evaluation of auditory intelligence.