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arXiv · 2606.22868

MSU-Bench: Towards Speaker-Centric Understanding in Conversational Multi-Speaker Scenarios

Zhaokai Sun·Shuai Wang·Zhennan Lin·Chengyou Wang·Dehui Gao·Yuang Cao·Chunjiang He·Pan Zhou·Lei Xie
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Abstract

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is moving from task-specific pipelines toward large audio language models (LALMs) that generate natural-language responses. However, existing speech benchmarks mainly focus on single-speaker settings or isolated subtasks, leaving speaker-centric understanding in realistic multi-speaker conversations insufficiently evaluated. We introduce MSU-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for multi-speaker conversational understanding, covering 16 speaker-centric tasks and 2,300 QA instances in a two-tier framework from speaker grounding to dialogue reasoning. We build a Gemini-assisted annotation and QA generation pipeline with human-in-the-loop verification, achieving high QA validity and strong agreement between human answers and verified labels. We further analyze speaker-referencing schemes and diagnostic error types to reveal bottlenecks in speaker grounding and reasoning. Experiments reveal clear gaps across model families, with closed-source systems leading overall but all models still facing challenges in complex speaker grounding and multi-speaker reasoning. The benchmark annotations, metadata, and evaluation scripts will be available at the GitHub repository: https://github.com/ASLP-lab/MSU-Bench.

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Zhaokai Sun, Shuai Wang, Zhennan Lin, Chengyou Wang, Dehui Gao, Yuang Cao, Chunjiang He, Pan Zhou, Lei Xie. 2026-06-22. MSU-Bench: Towards Speaker-Centric Understanding in Conversational Multi-Speaker Scenarios. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22868

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