AHELM: A Holistic Evaluation of Audio-Language Models
Authors: name: Tony Lee; name: Haoqin Tu; name: Chi Heem Wong; name: Zijun Wang; name: Siwei Yang; name: Yifan Mai; name: Yuyin Zhou; name: Cihang Xie; name: Percy Liang
Published: 2025-08-29 07:40:39

Abstract: Evaluations of audio-language models (ALMs) -- multimodal models that take
interleaved audio and text as input and output text -- are hindered by the lack
of standardized benchmarks; most benchmarks measure only one or two
capabilities and omit evaluative aspects such as fairness or safety.
Furthermore, comparison across models is difficult as separate evaluations test
a limited number of models and use different prompting methods and inference
parameters. To address these shortfalls, we introduce AHELM, a benchmark that
aggregates various datasets -- including 2 new synthetic audio-text datasets
called PARADE, which evaluates the ALMs on avoiding stereotypes, and
CoRe-Bench, which measures reasoning over conversational audio through
inferential multi-turn question answering -- to holistically measure the
performance of ALMs across 10 aspects we have identified as important to the
development and usage of ALMs: audio perception, knowledge, reasoning, emotion
detection, bias, fairness, multilinguality, robustness, toxicity, and safety.
We also standardize the prompts, inference parameters, and evaluation metrics
to ensure equitable comparisons across models. We test 14 open-weight and
closed-API ALMs from 3 developers and 3 additional simple baseline systems each
consisting of an automatic speech recognizer and a language model. Our results
show that while Gemini 2.5 Pro ranks top in 5 out of 10 aspects, it exhibits
group unfairness (p=0.01) on ASR tasks whereas most of the other models do
not. We also find that the baseline systems perform reasonably well on AHELM,
with one ranking 5th overall despite having only speech-to-text capabilities.
For transparency, all raw prompts, model generations, and outputs are available
on our website at https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/audio/v1.0.0. AHELM is
intended to be a living benchmark and new datasets and models will be added
over time.