From Waveforms to Wisdom: The New Benchmark for Auditory Intelligence

Google Research · 7 months ago

Researchers created the Massive Sound Embedding Benchmark (MSEB), a standardized evaluation framework presented at NeurIPS 2025 to assess multimodal AI systems' auditory capabilities across eight tasks including transcription, classification, and retrieval. The benchmark includes the Simple Voice Questions dataset with 177,352 spoken queries across 26 locales and 17 languages, plus integration of existing datasets like FSD50K and BirdSet covering various sound domains. Current sound representation models show substantial performance gaps across all tasks, with identified limitations including semantic bottlenecks from automatic speech recognition errors, poor robustness to background noise, inconsistent performance across languages, and over-reliance on complexity for simple acoustic tasks.