HEAR Who Said What: Unlocking Speaker-Attributed Reasoning via Counterfactual Voice Grounding
Speech Language Models (SLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-speaker environments, yet their ability to attribute speech to the correct speaker and reason over speaker identities remains unclear. Hence, we introduce HEAR, a conceptually hierarchical benchmark diagnosing the foundational capabilities of speaker-attributed reasoning, comprising 2.4K human-verified samples from 887 diverse multi-party audio clips. Evaluating 20 leading SLMs on HEAR reveals they struggle with these foundational tasks, often relying on semantic priors rather than actual vocal cues. To address this, we present A2R, a 30B model optimized on Counterfactual Audio with Speaker-level Hard negatives (CASH), a dat...
| Authors | Dongwook Lee, Sangkwon Park, Eunwoo Song et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 August 2026 |
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