Auditory Knowledge in LLM Backbones Shapes Audio Language Model Performance: Holistic Evaluation
arXiv 2603.19195·medium signal
This study (arXiv:2603.19195) evaluates how much auditory knowledge exists in standard LLM backbones and how that prior shapes downstream Audio Language Model (LALM) capability across diverse audio tasks. The evaluation is holistic, covering speech understanding, music, and environmental audio, revealing that backbone choice has outsized influence on zero-shot audio performance. Informs backbone selection decisions for practitioners building multimodal audio-capable agent systems.