MMAU-Pro: A Challenging and Comprehensive Benchmark for Holistic Evaluation of Audio General Intelligence
Sonal Kumar, Simon Sedlácek, Vaibhavi Lokegaonkar, Fernando López, Wenyi Yu, Nishit Anand, Hyeonggon Ryu, Lichang Chen, Maxim Plicka, Miroslav Hlavácek, William Fineas Ellingwood, Sathvik Udupa
Abstract
Audio comprehension-including speech, non-speech sounds, and music-is essential for achieving human-level intelligence. Consequently, AI agents must demonstrate holistic audio understanding to qualify as generally intelligent. However, evaluating auditory intelligence comprehensively remains challenging. To address this gap, we introduce MMAU-Pro, the most comprehensive and rigorously curated benchmark for assessing audio intelligence in AI systems. MMAU-Pro contains 5,305 instances, where each instance has one or more audios paired with human expert-generated question-answer pairs, spanning speech, sound, music, and their combinations. Unlike existing benchmarks, MMAU-Pro evaluates auditory intelligence across 49 unique skills and multiple complex dimensions, including long-form audio comprehension, spatial audio reasoning, multi-audio understanding, among others. All questions are meticulously designed to require deliberate multi-hop reasoning, including both multiple-choice and open-ended response formats. Importantly, audio data is sourced directly "from the wild" rather than from existing datasets with known distributions. We evaluate 22 leading open-source and proprietary multimodal AI models, revealing significant limitations: even state-of-the-art models such as Gemini 2.5 Flash and Audio Flamingo 3 achieve only 59.2% and 51.7% accuracy, respectively, approaching random performance in multiple categories. Our extensive analysis highlights specific shortcomings and provides novel insights, offering actionable perspectives for the community to enhance future AI systems' progression toward audio general intelligence. The benchmark and code is available at https://sonalkum.github.io/mmau-pro .
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Your agent calls
Luneget_paper_fulltext
Free to start. No credit card required.
Terminal
Install the CLIlune papers fulltext 3088201f-dbf1-458b-9db8-a5e33a6fd05dCited by top-tier papers7
- STAR-Bench: Probing Deep Spatio-Temporal Reasoning as Audio 4D IntelligenceZihan Liu, Zhikang Niu, Qiuyang Xiao, Zhisheng Zheng et al.ICLR 2026 · 12 citations
- Audio MultiChallenge: A Multi-Turn Evaluation of Spoken Dialogue Systems on Natural Human InteractionAdvait Gosai, Tyler Vuong, Utkarsh Tyagi, Steven Li et al.ACL 2026 · 10 citations
- Do Audio LLMs Listen or Read? Analyzing and Mitigating Paralinguistic Failures with VoxParadoxJiacheng Pang, Ashutosh Chaubey, Mohammad SoleymaniICML 2026 · 5 citations
- AuTAgent: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Tool-Augmented Audio ReasoningSiqian Tong, Xuan Li, Yiwei Wang, Baolong Bi et al.ICML 2026 · 3 citations
- Human or Machine? A Preliminary Turing Test for Speech-to-Speech InteractionXiang Li, Jiabao Gao, Sipei Lin, Xuan Zhou et al.ICLR 2026 · 1 citation
Builds on13
- Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackLong Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 24,707 citations
- Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak SupervisionAlec Radford, Jong Wook Kim, Tao Xu, Greg Brockman et al.ICML 2023 · 6,966 citations
- Pengi: An Audio Language Model for Audio TasksSoham Deshmukh, Benjamin Elizalde, Rita Singh, Huaming WangNeurIPS 2023 · 352 citations
- MMICL: Empowering Vision-language Model with Multi-Modal In-Context LearningHaozhe Zhao, Zefan Cai, Shuzheng Si, Xiaojian Ma et al.ICLR 2024 · 206 citations
- MMSU: A Massive Multi-task Spoken Language Understanding and Reasoning BenchmarkDingdong Wang, Junan Li, Jincenzi Wu, Dongchao Yang et al.ICLR 2026 · 143 citations
Related papers
- MMAU: A Massive Multi-Task Audio Understanding and Reasoning BenchmarkS. Sakshi, Utkarsh Tyagi, Sonal Kumar, Ashish Seth et al.ICLR 2025
- MAVERIX: Multimodal Audio-Visual Evaluation and Recognition IndeXLiuyue Xie, Avik Kuthiala, George Z. Wei, Ce Zheng et al.AAAI 2026 · 1 citation
- AVI-Bench: Toward Human-like Audio-Visual Intelligence of Omni-MLLMsYaoting Wang, Ziyi Zhang, Wenming Tu, Shaoxuan Xu et al.ICML 2026
- Audio Flamingo 2: An Audio-Language Model with Long-Audio Understanding and Expert Reasoning AbilitiesSreyan Ghosh, Zhifeng Kong, Sonal Kumar, S. Sakshi et al.ICML 2025
- Audio Flamingo 3: Advancing Audio Intelligence with Fully Open Large Audio Language ModelsSreyan Ghosh, Arushi Goel, Jaehyeon Kim, Sonal Kumar et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 299 citations
