Heard but Not Heeded: Paralinguistic Information Encoding and Loss in Audio-Language Models
Audio language models are designed to understand speech, yet it remains unclear whether they capture how something is said beyond what is said. We present a mechanistic analysis of paralinguistic information in four open source models, Whisper-large-v2, Qwen2-Audio-7B Instruct, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, and Chroma-4B, using the Expresso dataset with controlled speaking styles. We combine centered kernel alignment, linear probing with leave one speaker out evaluation, open ended tone prediction, and a content prosody leakage metric to trace how style information moves from the audio encoder to the final output. All models strongly encode speaking style in the late encoder, that is, the top third of...
| Authors | Bhuvan Koduru, Dareen Safar B Alharthi, Rita Singh et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 1 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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