SCENEBench: An Audio Understanding Benchmark Grounded in Assistive and Industrial Use Cases

Researchers introduce SCENEBench, a new benchmark for evaluating Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) beyond speech recognition, focusing on real-world audio understanding including background sounds, noise localization, and vocal characteristics. Testing of five state-of-the-art models revealed significant performance gaps, with some tasks performing below random chance while others achieved high accuracy.