Do Audio Language Models Use Paralinguistic Evidence? Counterfactual Audits for Response Evaluation
Audio-language models (ALMs) are increasingly used as judges for speech-to-speech systems, but a judge that receives audio may not actually use paralinguistic evidence. We introduce counterfactual audits for paralinguistic response evaluation. Each audit item holds the transcript fixed while varying affect, prosody, or the timing of an affective shift, forcing a valid judge to track the audio cue rather than lexical content or response style. We evaluate ALM judges using a native one-context judgment protocol and a contrastive recoverability control, then further decompose each item into its constituent perception and response-mapping skills. This yields useful diagnostic states that iden...
| Authors | Kevin Miller, Arjun Chandra, Venkatesh Saligrama |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 7 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 August 2026 |
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