How Auditory Knowledge in LLM Backbones Shapes Audio Language Models: A Holistic Evaluation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19195v1
• Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:50:07 GMT
• Title: How Auditory Knowledge in LLM Backbones Shapes Audio Language Models: A Holistic Evaluation
• Abstract summary: Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used as knowledge backbones of Large Audio Language Models (LALMs)<n>We study how much auditory knowledge they encode through text-only pre-training and how this affects downstream performance.<n>Our findings reveal that auditory knowledge varies substantially across families, and text-only results are strongly correlated with audio performance.
• Score: 97.0235251827591
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used as knowledge backbones of Large Audio Language Models (LALMs), yet how much auditory knowledge they encode through text-only pre-training and how this affects downstream performance remains unclear. We study this gap by comparing different LLMs under two text-only and one audio-grounded setting: (1) direct probing on AKB-2000, a curated benchmark testing the breadth and depth of auditory knowledge; (2) cascade evaluation, where LLMs reason over text descriptions from an audio captioner; and (3) audio-grounded evaluation, where each LLM is fine-tuned into a Large Audio Language Model (LALM) with an audio encoder. Our findings reveal that auditory knowledge varies substantially across families, and text-only results are strongly correlated with audio performance. Our work provides empirical grounding for a comprehensive understanding of LLMs in audio research.

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