AEQ-Bench: Measuring Empathy of Omni-Modal Large Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10513v1
• Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:39:50 GMT
• Title: AEQ-Bench: Measuring Empathy of Omni-Modal Large Models
• Authors: Xuan Luo, Lewei Yao, Libo Zhao, Lanqing Hong, Kai Chen, Dehua Tao, Daxin Tan, Ruifeng Xu, Jing Li,
• Abstract summary: We introduce AEQ-Bench, a novel benchmark to assess two core empathetic capabilities of omni-modal large models (OLMs)<n>AEQ-Bench incorporates two novel settings that vary in context specificity and speech tone.<n> Comprehensive assessment across linguistic and paralinguistic metrics reveals that OLMs trained with audio output capabilities generally outperformed models with text-only outputs.
• Score: 55.722881748046895
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: While the automatic evaluation of omni-modal large models (OLMs) is essential, assessing empathy remains a significant challenge due to its inherent affectivity. To investigate this challenge, we introduce AEQ-Bench (Audio Empathy Quotient Benchmark), a novel benchmark to systematically assess two core empathetic capabilities of OLMs: (i) generating empathetic responses by comprehending affective cues from multi-modal inputs (audio + text), and (ii) judging the empathy of audio responses without relying on text transcription. Compared to existing benchmarks, AEQ-Bench incorporates two novel settings that vary in context specificity and speech tone. Comprehensive assessment across linguistic and paralinguistic metrics reveals that (1) OLMs trained with audio output capabilities generally outperformed models with text-only outputs, and (2) while OLMs align with human judgments for coarse-grained quality assessment, they remain unreliable for evaluating fine-grained paralinguistic expressiveness.

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