Bridging Ears and Eyes: Analyzing Audio and Visual Large Language Models to Humans in Visible Sound Recognition and Reducing Their Sensory Gap via Cross-Modal Distillation

Audio large language models (LLMs) are considered experts at recognizing sound objects, yet their performance relative to LLMs in other sensory modalities, such as visual or audio-visual LLMs, and to humans using their ears, eyes, or both remains unexplored. To investigate this, we systematically evaluate audio, visual, and audio-visual LLMs, specifically Qwen2-Audio, Qwen2-VL, and Qwen2.5-Omni, against humans in recognizing sound objects of different classes from audio-only, silent video, or sounded video inputs. We uncover a performance gap between Qwen2-Audio and Qwen2-VL that parallels the sensory discrepancy between human ears and eyes. To reduce this gap, we introduce a cross-modal distillation framework, where an LLM in one modality serves as the teacher and another as the student, with knowledge transfer in sound classes predicted as more challenging to the student by a heuristic model. Distillation in both directions, from Qwen2-VL to Qwen2-Audio and vice versa, leads to notable improvements, particularly in challenging classes. This work highlights the sensory gap in LLMs from a human-aligned perspective and proposes a principled approach to enhancing modality-specific perception in multimodal LLMs.

AAD-LLM: Neural Attention-Driven Auditory Scene Understanding

Auditory foundation models, including auditory large language models (LLMs), process all sound inputs equally, independent of listener perception. However, human auditory perception is inherently selective: listeners focus on specific speakers while ignoring others in complex auditory scenes. Existing models do not incorporate this selectivity, limiting their ability to generate perception-aligned responses. To address this, we introduce Intention-Informed Auditory Scene Understanding (II-ASU) and present Auditory Attention-Driven LLM (AAD-LLM), a prototype system that integrates brain signals to infer listener attention. AAD-LLM extends an auditory LLM by incorporating intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings to decode which speaker a listener is attending to and refine responses accordingly. The model first predicts the attended speaker from neural activity, then conditions response generation on this inferred attentional state. We evaluate AAD-LLM on speaker description, speech transcription and extraction, and question answering in multitalker scenarios, with both objective and subjective ratings showing improved alignment with listener intention. By taking a first step toward intention-aware auditory AI, this work explores a new paradigm where listener perception informs machine listening, paving the way for future listener-centered auditory systems. Demo and code available: https://aad-llm.github.io.

Improved Decoding of Attentional Selection in Multi-Talker Environments with Self-Supervised Learned Speech Representation

Auditory attention decoding (AAD) is a technique used to identify and amplify the talker that a listener is focused on in a noisy environment. This is done by comparing the listener's brainwaves to a representation of all the sound sources to find the closest match. The representation is typically the waveform or spectrogram of the sounds. The effectiveness of these representations for AAD is uncertain. In this study, we examined the use of self-supervised learned speech representation in improving the accuracy and speed of AAD. We recorded the brain activity of three subjects using invasive electrocorticography (ECoG) as they listened to two conversations and focused on one. We used WavLM to extract a latent representation of each talker and trained a spatiotemporal filter to map brain activity to intermediate representations of speech. During the evaluation, the reconstructed representation is compared to each speaker's representation to determine the target speaker. Our results indicate that speech representation from WavLM provides better decoding accuracy and speed than the speech envelope and spectrogram. Our findings demonstrate the advantages of self-supervised learned speech representation for auditory attention decoding and pave the way for developing brain-controlled hearable technologies.