HEAR: Real Voices, Real Bias: A Large-Scale Human-Recorded, Demographically Diverse Benchmark for Audio Language Models
TL;DR
The results reveal that voice-conditioned bias is a model-specific property and establish that voice bias is a controllable model characteristic, providing a foundational framework for future bias mitigation and evaluation in Audio-LLM development.
Abstract
We introduce HEAR (Human-recorded Evaluation of Audio-LLM bias by Real speakers), a large-scale, ecologically valid benchmark comprising 87k real human audio samples from 843 demographically diverse participants. HEAR enables comprehensive evaluation through Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) and open-ended long-form tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale voice benchmark grounded entirely in authentic human speech. We evaluate model behavior across both real-time speech-to-speech and speech-to-text architectures. Our results reveal that voice-conditioned bias is a model-specific property. Furthermore, we demonstrate that personalization instructions consistently exacerbate demographic disparities. Our findings establish that voice bias is a controllable model characteristic, providing a foundational framework for future bias mitigation and evaluation in Audio-LLM development.
