ChronosAudio: A Comprehensive Long-Audio Benchmark for Evaluating Audio-Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Luo, Kaiwen, Lin, Liang, Zhang, Yibo, Aloqaily, Moayad, Tao, Jialiang, Wang, Dexian, Zhou, Zhenhong, Zhang, Junwei, Wang, Kun, Sun, Li, Wen, Qingsong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Luo, Kaiwen
Lin, Liang
Zhang, Yibo
Aloqaily, Moayad
Tao, Jialiang
Wang, Dexian
Zhou, Zhenhong
Zhang, Junwei
Wang, Kun
Sun, Li
Wen, Qingsong
author_facet Luo, Kaiwen
Lin, Liang
Zhang, Yibo
Aloqaily, Moayad
Tao, Jialiang
Wang, Dexian
Zhou, Zhenhong
Zhang, Junwei
Wang, Kun
Sun, Li
Wen, Qingsong
contents Although Audio Large Language Models (ALLMs) have witnessed substantial advancements, their long audio understanding capabilities remain unexplored. A plethora of benchmarks have been proposed for general audio tasks, they predominantly focus on short-form clips, leaving without a consensus on evaluating ALLMs over extended durations. This paper proposes ChronosAudio, the first multi-task benchmark tailored for long-audio understanding in ALLMs. It encompasses six major task categories and comprises 36,000 test instances totaling over 200 hours audio, stratified into short, middle, and long-form categories to comprehensively evaluate length generalization. Extensive experiments on 16 state-of-the-art models using ChronosAudio yield three critical findings: 1.Precipitous Long-Context Collapse: ALLMs exhibit a severe inability to sustain performance, with the transition from short to long contexts triggering a staggering performance degradation of over 90% in specific tasks. 2.Structural Attention Dilution: Performance degradation stems from a fundamental failure in maintaining temporal locality; attention mechanisms suffer from significant diffusion in later sequences. 3.Restorative Ceiling of Mitigation: Current strategies only offer 50% recovery. These findings reveal significant challenges in long-audio, underscoring the urgent need for approaches to achieve robust, document-level audio reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_04876
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ChronosAudio: A Comprehensive Long-Audio Benchmark for Evaluating Audio-Large Language Models
Luo, Kaiwen
Lin, Liang
Zhang, Yibo
Aloqaily, Moayad
Tao, Jialiang
Wang, Dexian
Zhou, Zhenhong
Zhang, Junwei
Wang, Kun
Sun, Li
Wen, Qingsong
Sound
Although Audio Large Language Models (ALLMs) have witnessed substantial advancements, their long audio understanding capabilities remain unexplored. A plethora of benchmarks have been proposed for general audio tasks, they predominantly focus on short-form clips, leaving without a consensus on evaluating ALLMs over extended durations. This paper proposes ChronosAudio, the first multi-task benchmark tailored for long-audio understanding in ALLMs. It encompasses six major task categories and comprises 36,000 test instances totaling over 200 hours audio, stratified into short, middle, and long-form categories to comprehensively evaluate length generalization. Extensive experiments on 16 state-of-the-art models using ChronosAudio yield three critical findings: 1.Precipitous Long-Context Collapse: ALLMs exhibit a severe inability to sustain performance, with the transition from short to long contexts triggering a staggering performance degradation of over 90% in specific tasks. 2.Structural Attention Dilution: Performance degradation stems from a fundamental failure in maintaining temporal locality; attention mechanisms suffer from significant diffusion in later sequences. 3.Restorative Ceiling of Mitigation: Current strategies only offer 50% recovery. These findings reveal significant challenges in long-audio, underscoring the urgent need for approaches to achieve robust, document-level audio reasoning.
title ChronosAudio: A Comprehensive Long-Audio Benchmark for Evaluating Audio-Large Language Models
topic Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04876