TAU: A Benchmark for Cultural Sound Understanding Beyond Semantics
ICASSP 2026 - 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) , 15542–15546 , 2026
Abstract
Large audio-language models are advancing rapidly, yet most evaluations emphasize speech or globally sourced sounds, overlooking culturally distinctive cues. This gap raises a critical question: can current models generalize to localized, non-semantic audio that communities instantly recognize but outsiders do not? To address this, we present TAU (Taiwan Audio Understanding), a benchmark of everyday Taiwanese "soundmarks." TAU is built through a pipeline combining curated sources, human editing, and LLM-assisted question generation, producing 702 clips and 1,794 multiple-choice items that cannot be solved by transcripts alone. Experiments show that state-of-the-art LALMs, including Gemini 2.5 and Qwen2-Audio, perform far below local humans. TAU demonstrates the need for localized benchmarks to reveal cultural blind spots, guide more equitable multimodal evaluation, and ensure models serve communities beyond the global mainstream.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{lin2025tau,
title = {TAU: A Benchmark for Cultural Sound Understanding Beyond Semantics},
author = {Lin, Yi-Cheng and Chen, Yu-Hua and Dong, Jia-Kai and Huang, Yueh-Hsuan and Chen, Szu-Chi and Chen, Yu-Chen and Chen, Chih-Yao and Lin, Yu-Jung and Chen, Yu-Ling and Chen, Zih-Yu and Tsai, I-Ning and Wang, Hsiu-Hsuan and Chung, Ho-Lam and Lu, Ke-Han and Lee, Hung-yi},
booktitle = {ICASSP 2026 - 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
year = {2026},
pages = {15542--15546},
doi = {10.1109/ICASSP55912.2026.11461652},
}