IFEval-Audio: Benchmarking Instruction-Following Capability in Audio-based Large Language Models

Yiming Gao, Bin Wang, Chengwei Wei, Shuo Sun, AiTi Aw


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong instruction-following capabilities in text-based tasks. However, this ability often deteriorates in multimodal models after alignment with non-text modalities such as images or audio. While several recent efforts have investigated instruction-following performance in text and vision-language models, instruction-following in audio-based large language models remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce IFEval-Audio, a novel evaluation dataset designed to assess the ability to follow instructions in an audio LLM. IFEval-Audio contains 280 audio–instruction–answer triples across six diverse dimensions: Content, Capitalization, Symbol, List Structure, Length, and Format. Each example pairs an audio input with a text instruction, requiring the model to generate an output that follows a specified structure. We benchmark state-of-the-art audio LLMs on their ability to follow audio-involved instructions. The dataset is released publicly to support future research in this emerging area.
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-short.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venues:
IJCNLP | AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
120–127
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-short.11/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yiming Gao, Bin Wang, Chengwei Wei, Shuo Sun, and AiTi Aw. 2025. IFEval-Audio: Benchmarking Instruction-Following Capability in Audio-based Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 120–127, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
IFEval-Audio: Benchmarking Instruction-Following Capability in Audio-based Large Language Models (Gao et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-short.11.pdf