Journal article
A Blind Score Is Not a Reliance Measure: What Answering Without the Audio Shows About Audio-Language Benchmarks, Why the Partial-Input Debate Already Settled Half of It, and the Counterfactual-Audio Test the Other Half Needs
Audio-language models are now routinely tested with the audio taken away, and the results are read in opposite directions. One 2026 audit reports that eight models keep 60 to 72 percent of their accuracy on three benchmarks when the audio is omitted, and concludes that the scores largely reflect…