MMAR: A Challenging Benchmark for Deep Reasoning in Speech, Audio, Music, and Their Mix

We introduce MMAR, a new benchmark designed to evaluate the deep reasoning capabilities of Audio-Language Models (ALMs) across massive multi-disciplinary tasks. MMAR comprises 1,000 meticulously curated audio-question-answer triplets, collected from real-world internet videos and refined through iterative error corrections and quality checks to ensure high quality. Unlike existing benchmarks that are limited to specific domains of sound, music, or speech, MMAR extends them to a broad spectrum of real-world audio scenarios, including mixed-modality combinations of sound, music, and speech. Each question in MMAR is hierarchically categorized across four reasoning layers: Signal, Perception, Semantic, and Cultural, with additional sub-categories within each layer to reflect task diversity and complexity. To further foster research in this area, we annotate every question with a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationale to promote future advancements in audio reasoning. Each item in the benchmark demands multi-step deep reasoning beyond surface-level understanding. Moreover, a part of the questions requires graduate-level perceptual and domain-specific knowledge, elevating the benchmark's difficulty and depth. We evaluate MMAR using a broad set of models, including Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs), Large Audio Reasoning Models (LARMs), Omni Language Models (OLMs), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), with audio caption inputs. The performance of these models on MMAR highlights the benchmark's challenging nature, and our analysis further reveals critical limitations of understanding and reasoning capabilities among current models. We hope MMAR will serve as a catalyst for future advances in this important but little-explored area.

ViT3D Alignment of LLaMA3: 3D Medical Image Report Generation

Automatic medical report generation (MRG), which aims to produce detailed text reports from medical images, has emerged as a critical task in this domain. MRG systems can enhance radiological workflows by reducing the time and effort required for report writing, thereby improving diagnostic efficiency. In this work, we present a novel approach for automatic MRG utilizing a multimodal large language model. Specifically, we employed the 3D Vision Transformer (ViT3D) image encoder introduced from M3D-CLIP to process 3D scans and use the Asclepius-Llama3-8B as the language model to generate the text reports by auto-regressive decoding. The experiment shows our model achieved an average Green score of 0.3 on the MRG task validation set and an average accuracy of 0.61 on the visual question answering (VQA) task validation set, outperforming the baseline model. Our approach demonstrates the effectiveness of the ViT3D alignment of LLaMA3 for automatic MRG and VQA tasks by tuning the model on a small dataset.