The global deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) underscores the urgent need to evaluate their cultural alignment. However, assessing genuine "cultural awareness" across modalities (text, vision, speech) and languages remains a significant challenge. To comprehensively investigate this domain, we propose MMAC, a systematic framework that encompasses a tri-modally aligned cultural benchmark creation pipeline and a five-dimensional evaluation protocol to assess cross-country awareness disparities, evaluate cross-lingual and cross-modal consistency, and verify cultural knowledge generalization and grounding validity. Given the prevailing Western cultural bias in current models, we focus on 8 Asian countries as our dataset foundation to more acutely reveal potential cultural deficiencies in LLMs. Our dataset, MMAC-bench, features 27,000 human-curated questions across 10 languages. Crucially, it is the first dataset aligned at the input level across text, image, and speech, enabling direct cross-modal transfer tests. Each question consists of multiple-choice options accompanied by open-ended generated explanations, where 79% require multi-step reasoning grounded in cultural context, moving beyond simple memorization. We probe the causes of modal divergence, offering insights into fostering culturally robust MLLMs.

The integration of generative artificial intelligence into educational applications has enhanced personalized and interactive learning experiences, and it shows strong potential to promote young learners language acquisition. However, it is still challenging to ensure consistent and robust performance across different languages and cultural contexts, and kids-friendly design requires simplified instructions, engaging interactions, and age-appropriate scaffolding to maintain motivation and optimize learning outcomes.In this work, we introduce SingaKids, a dialogic tutor designed to facilitate language learning through picture description tasks. Our system integrates dense image captioning, multilingual dialogic interaction, speech understanding, and engaging speech generation to create an immersive learning environment in four languages: English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. We further improve the system through multilingual pre-training, task-specific tuning, and scaffolding optimization. Empirical studies with elementary school students demonstrate that SingaKids provides effective dialogic teaching, benefiting learners at different performance levels.

Various audio-LLMs (ALLMs) have been explored recently for tackling different audio tasks simultaneously using a single, unified model. While existing evaluations of ALLMs primarily focus on single-audio tasks, real-world applications often involve processing multiple audio streams simultaneously. To bridge this gap, we propose the first multi-audio evaluation (MAE) benchmark that consists of 20 datasets from 11 multi-audio tasks encompassing both speech and sound scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on MAE demonstrate that the existing ALLMs, while being powerful in comprehending primary audio elements in individual audio inputs, struggling to handle multi-audio scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel multi-audio-LLM (MALLM) to capture audio context among multiple similar audios using discriminative learning on our proposed synthetic data. The results demonstrate that the proposed MALLM outperforms all baselines and achieves high data efficiency using synthetic data without requiring human annotations. The proposed MALLM opens the door for ALLMs towards multi-audio processing era and brings us closer to replicating human auditory capabilities in machines.