Audio-language models increasingly generate confident music descriptions that are unsupported by the input audio. We present, to our knowledge, the first music-specific, layer-wise, multi-paradigm empirical study of hallucination in audio-language models and formulate it as a hierarchical perceptual grounding failure across five layers: sound events, temporal properties, tonal attributes, style, and emotion. We introduce MuseDiag, a multi-paradigm diagnostic framework with contradiction-based verification, and evaluate nine models (four open-source and five closed-source). We find that (1) vocal misperception is a universal weakness across all nine models, tonal perception is a major axis of architectural differentiation, and Audio-Flamingo-3 remains the stable leader while substantial reordering below it reveals paradigm-specific vulnerability profiles; (2) affirmative bias, generation-mode effects, and layer-specific perceptual limitations are each empirically associated with the observed patterns, with convergent evidence from multiple analyses rather than strict causal attribution; and (3) our two training-free mitigation methods, Audio-Dependency-Aware Decoding for Music (ADD-M) and Taxonomy-Guided Perceptual Anchoring (TPA), can reduce hallucination in probing, but their gains vary by model and often do not carry over to free-form generation, showing that music hallucination mitigation must be evaluated across paradigms.
Yu Liu, Jia-Hui Liu, Zhi-Lin Liu et al.· 0 citations
Multimodal large language model (MLLM) agents are increasingly used as personal assistants for long-running tasks. Their utility depends on continuity: agents must retrieve and use earlier evidence across dialogue, files, and workspace state. However, agents can generate plausible answers even when access to that history has degraded, causing outcome-only evaluation to overestimate true evidence use. We present MIRAGE (Multimodal Interaction Retrieval, Attribution, and Grounding Evaluation), a controlled study of historical evidence use under conversation-state variation in multimodal personal agents. MIRAGE holds evidence objects, questions, and scoring fixed while varying only conversation state, and evaluates whether an agent can determine answerability, recover the correct source, and answer from it. Across seven frontier and open-weight multimodal backbones, we find that: 1) pre-compaction depth and post-compaction continuation form distinct, non-monotonic failure regimes rather than a single degradation curve; 2) open-weight models rely heavily on context continuity and are reluctant to spontaneously switch to tool-mediated retrieval when provenance fails; and 3) retrieval pressure improves source attribution in deep pre-compaction states for tool-compliant models, but consistently regresses after compaction, where stored evidence has already degraded. These findings show that historical evidence use should be evaluated under state variation, rather than inferred from outcome-only correctness.
Yu Liu, Wen-Xiao Zhang, Cheng Hu et al.· 0 citations
As large language models evolve from question-answering systems into general-purpose agents, evaluation must move beyond static answer correctness to assess multimodal perception, multi-step execution, tool use, and artifact delivery. However, existing benchmarks are often tied to specific task types, execution environments, or scoring protocols, limiting their comparability, interpretability, and reliability for deployment decisions. We introduce DAREBench (Deployment-Aware and Reliable Evaluation of Models as Agents), a benchmark designed to capture workload variation and support reliable agent evaluation. Built on a shared OpenClaw execution environment, DAREBench organizes 233 tasks selected and adapted from 22 source benchmarks into a $2\times3$ workload matrix defined by input modality and execution form, and evaluates them under a unified contract-based protocol with evidence-based score auditing. We evaluate 23 commercial API models and 12 locally deployed open-weight models over 7,587 model--task runs, reporting accuracy and token consumption alongside reference costs for API models. Results show that no single model dominates all workload groups, text and multimodal tasks exhibit distinct accuracy--cost trade-offs, and local open-weight models are competitive in several groups but still trail frontier commercial models overall. These findings suggest that agent deployment and model selection should consider workload profiles, deployment mode, and accuracy--cost trade-offs rather than rely on a single aggregate score.
Yu Liu, Zhi-Lin Liu, Zhi-Wei Yang et al.· 0 citations
CARE (Canonicalization, Attribution, and Resolution Engine), a shell-specific, static-first verifier for individual shell commands before execution can reduce dispatch-boundary risk for LLM agents while preserving most benign workflows.
Yu Liu, Wenxiao Zhang, Zhiwei Yang et al.· arXiv.org· 1 citation
We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads.
See our Cookie Policy.
