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

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission275 Authors

Keywords: Audio Large Language Models; Benchmark

Abstract: 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. The codes and dataset are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ChronosAudio-D49A

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Resources and Evaluation

Research Area Keywords: benchmarking; evaluation

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment, Data resources, Data analysis

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 275