Auditing Protocol-Level Shortcuts in Large Audio Language Model Judges for Speech Evaluation
Large audio-language models (LALMs) are increasingly used as automatic judges for speech evaluation. However, high agreement with human ratings does not guarantee that their verdicts are grounded in the audio. A judge may instead rely on specialist labels or reference data supplied by the evaluation protocol itself, taking a shortcut in place of listening to the audio. In this paper, we audit such protocol-level ``shortcuts'' in LALM judges across three common deployment protocols: feature-blueprint judging, where the audio is replaced by a structured text description of acoustic features, reference-conditioned judging, and pairwise A/B comparison. Across six judges and four attributes, w...
| Authors | Joonyong Park, David M. Chan, Yuki Saito et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 15 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 July 2026 |
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