@inproceedings{rajgarhia-etal-2026-seabed,
title = "{SEABED}: {S}outh{E}ast {A}sian Benchmark for Evaluating Audio Reasoning",
author = "Rajgarhia, Harshit and
Shaik, Asif and
Lokesh, Rachuri and
Pani, Sushanta Kumar and
Mukherji, Abhishek",
editor = "T.Y.S.S., Santosh and
Ghosh, Sreyan and
Duraiswami, Ramani and
Watanabe, Shinji and
Arora, Siddhant and
Kumar, Sonal and
Adi, Yossi and
Manocha, Dinesh and
Garcia Perera, Leibny Paola",
booktitle = "The Proceedings of Speech and Audio Language Models Workshop (2nd Edition)",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.salma-1.8/",
pages = "85--120",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-496-5",
abstract = "Modern audio-language models are no longer judged only on what words they can transcribe, but on whether they can reason over what they hear: recovering meaning that lives in tone and prosody, telling dialects and regional languages apart, and resolving ambiguity that the written form leaves open. This capability is now measured by a growing family of audio-reasoning benchmarks, but almost entirely in English and on general-domain audio. Southeast Asia (SEA) is served instead by benchmarks that inherit an English task taxonomy of recognition, translation, and paralinguistic classification, and therefore test whether a model hears SEA speech rather than whether it can reason from it. We introduce SEABED, an audio-first question answering dataset designed to benchmark language and audio reasoning models on SEA speech. SEABED comprises a suite of six audio-reasoning tasks built entirely from real, openly available SEA speech corpora, yielding 5,404 question-answer pairs. We evaluate six frontier and region-specific audio LLMs: even the state-of-the-art model Gemini 3.5 Flash achieves only 50.3{\%} weighted average accuracy. SEABED evaluates not only answer accuracy, but also whether models' stated reasoning is grounded in the audio evidence. A sample of the benchmark data is available here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/CentificAIResearch/SEABED."
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<abstract>Modern audio-language models are no longer judged only on what words they can transcribe, but on whether they can reason over what they hear: recovering meaning that lives in tone and prosody, telling dialects and regional languages apart, and resolving ambiguity that the written form leaves open. This capability is now measured by a growing family of audio-reasoning benchmarks, but almost entirely in English and on general-domain audio. Southeast Asia (SEA) is served instead by benchmarks that inherit an English task taxonomy of recognition, translation, and paralinguistic classification, and therefore test whether a model hears SEA speech rather than whether it can reason from it. We introduce SEABED, an audio-first question answering dataset designed to benchmark language and audio reasoning models on SEA speech. SEABED comprises a suite of six audio-reasoning tasks built entirely from real, openly available SEA speech corpora, yielding 5,404 question-answer pairs. We evaluate six frontier and region-specific audio LLMs: even the state-of-the-art model Gemini 3.5 Flash achieves only 50.3% weighted average accuracy. SEABED evaluates not only answer accuracy, but also whether models’ stated reasoning is grounded in the audio evidence. A sample of the benchmark data is available here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/CentificAIResearch/SEABED.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T SEABED: SouthEast Asian Benchmark for Evaluating Audio Reasoning
%A Rajgarhia, Harshit
%A Shaik, Asif
%A Lokesh, Rachuri
%A Pani, Sushanta Kumar
%A Mukherji, Abhishek
%Y T.Y.S.S., Santosh
%Y Ghosh, Sreyan
%Y Duraiswami, Ramani
%Y Watanabe, Shinji
%Y Arora, Siddhant
%Y Kumar, Sonal
%Y Adi, Yossi
%Y Manocha, Dinesh
%Y Garcia Perera, Leibny Paola
%S The Proceedings of Speech and Audio Language Models Workshop (2nd Edition)
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-496-5
%F rajgarhia-etal-2026-seabed
%X Modern audio-language models are no longer judged only on what words they can transcribe, but on whether they can reason over what they hear: recovering meaning that lives in tone and prosody, telling dialects and regional languages apart, and resolving ambiguity that the written form leaves open. This capability is now measured by a growing family of audio-reasoning benchmarks, but almost entirely in English and on general-domain audio. Southeast Asia (SEA) is served instead by benchmarks that inherit an English task taxonomy of recognition, translation, and paralinguistic classification, and therefore test whether a model hears SEA speech rather than whether it can reason from it. We introduce SEABED, an audio-first question answering dataset designed to benchmark language and audio reasoning models on SEA speech. SEABED comprises a suite of six audio-reasoning tasks built entirely from real, openly available SEA speech corpora, yielding 5,404 question-answer pairs. We evaluate six frontier and region-specific audio LLMs: even the state-of-the-art model Gemini 3.5 Flash achieves only 50.3% weighted average accuracy. SEABED evaluates not only answer accuracy, but also whether models’ stated reasoning is grounded in the audio evidence. A sample of the benchmark data is available here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/CentificAIResearch/SEABED.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.salma-1.8/
%P 85-120
Markdown (Informal)
[SEABED: SouthEast Asian Benchmark for Evaluating Audio Reasoning](https://aclanthology.org/2026.salma-1.8/) (Rajgarhia et al., SALMA 2026)
ACL