@inproceedings{wei-etal-2026-bias,
    title = "Bias in the Ear of the Listener: Assessing Sensitivity in Audio Language Models Across Linguistic, Demographic, and Positional Variations",
    author = "Wei, Sheng-Lun  and
      Liao, Yu-Ling  and
      Chang, Yen-Hua  and
      Huang, Hen-Hsen  and
      Chen, Hsin-Hsi",
    editor = "Demberg, Vera  and
      Inui, Kentaro  and
      Marquez, Llu{\'i}s",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EACL} 2026",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.80/",
    pages = "1570--1589",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-386-9",
    abstract = "Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) extend language understanding beyond text to speech, enabling unified reasoning across modalities. While biases in text-based LLMs have been widely examined, their persistence and manifestation in spoken inputs remain underexplored. This work presents the first systematic investigation of speech bias in multilingual MLLMs.We construct and release the BiasInEar Dataset, a speech-augmented benchmark based on Global MMLU Lite, spanning English, Chinese, and Korean, balanced by gender and accent, and totaling 70.8 hours ($\approx$4,249 minutes) of speech with 11,200 questions. Using four complementary metrics (accuracy, entropy, APES, and Fleiss' $\kappa$), we evaluate nine representative models under linguistic language and accent, demographic gender, and structural option order perturbations. Our findings reveal that MLLMs are relatively robust to demographic factors but highly sensitive to language and option order, suggesting that speech can amplify existing structural biases. Moreover, architectural design and reasoning strategy substantially affect robustness across languages. Overall, this study establishes a unified framework for assessing fairness and robustness in speech-integrated LLMs, bridging the gap between text- and speech-based evaluation."
}