MMAU (Massive Multi-Task Audio Understanding)

What it measures

10,000 audio clips with human-annotated natural-language questions requiring expert-level reasoning over speech, environmental sounds, and music.

Reading the measurement

Study what information the model receives and which inference the answer requires. A question may mix recall, visual perception, deduction and search. Use task breakdowns to find the mechanism behind a headline gain.

Published evaluation

MMAU test accuracy; MMAU · full test split. The source’s task split, model configuration and scoring units are retained.

Where this fits in an evaluation suite

Ask what the task actually requires: recall, deduction, search, or a mixture. Separate closed-book reasoning from retrieval and tool-assisted problem solving.

Start with a capability hypothesis, then choose a second test with a different failure mode. Keep the checkpoint, reasoning effort, agent tools, sampling policy, and scoring procedure fixed when measuring a training intervention. Record failures and missing outputs in the denominator.

A reproducible comparison

MMAU test accuracy; MMAU · full test split. The source’s task split, model configuration and scoring units are retained.

Publish the exact run configuration, item coverage, score units, and available uncertainty. If a source supplies only an aggregate or a single run, preserve that limit. A new model name or a rounded score alone does not establish a capability improvement.