evalstone/evalscope/docs/en/benchmarks/air_bench_chat.md
2026-07-08 08:57:50 +00:00

6.4 KiB

AIR-Bench-Chat

Overview

AIR-Bench Chat is the generative half of AIR-Bench (Audio InstRuction Benchmark, ACL 2024 main conference) — the first instruction-following benchmark for large audio-language models (LALMs), covering human speech, natural sounds and music. It contains roughly 2k open-ended audio QA pairs covering speech, sound, music and mixed-audio scenes; responses are graded by a GPT-4 judge against a reference answer.

Task Description

  • Task Type: Open-ended audio question answering.
  • Input: An audio clip plus a free-form question.
  • Output: A textual answer evaluated against the reference response.

Categories (8 tasks → 5 reported categories)

The 8 Chat tasks are aggregated by the official cal_score.py into five categories:

  • speech: speech_QA, speech_dialogue_QA
  • sound: sound_QA, sound_generation_QA
  • music: music_QA, music_generation_analysis_QA
  • speech_and_sound: speech_and_sound_QA
  • speech_and_music: speech_and_music_QA

The paper's Mixed-audio = mean(speech_and_sound, speech_and_music).

Dataset Access

  • The dataset is hosted on ModelScope: evalscope/AIR-Bench-Dataset. It uses an audiofolder + JSON metadata layout. evalscope downloads it lazily via modelscope.dataset_snapshot_download on first run; the full release is ~49 GB, so it is recommended to limit which tasks are pulled via extra_params.
  • If the dataset is already on disk, pass dataset_args={'air_bench_chat': {'local_path': '/path/to/AIR-Bench-Dataset'}}; the local root should contain Chat/.

Evaluation Protocol

  • The judge LLM (default: GPT-4) receives the question, the textual audio description (meta_info from the dataset), the reference answer (answer_gt), and the model's response. It outputs a single line with two integer scores in [1, 10].
  • To remove position bias, every sample is judged twice with the order of reference and prediction swapped, then averaged. This mirrors cal_score.py in the official repository — disable it via extra_params={'do_swap': False} to halve judge cost.
  • Reported metric gpt_score is the model's mean judge score; win_rate records how often the model strictly beats the reference.
The official leaderboard uses `gpt-4-0125-preview` as the judge model. If that exact snapshot is unavailable, use an available GPT-4-class judge; absolute scores can drift versus the published numbers because the judge model changed.

Implementation Notes

  • The judge model is selected via --judge-model-args; ensure the model id supports long contexts (meta_info may exceed 4k tokens for dialogue tasks).
  • Set extra_params={'tasks': [...]} to evaluate only specific Chat task names — useful for partial runs.

Properties

Property Value
Benchmark Name air_bench_chat
Dataset ID evalscope/AIR-Bench
Paper Paper
Tags Audio, InstructionFollowing, QA
Metrics gpt_score, win_rate
Default Shots 0-shot
Evaluation Split test

Data Statistics

Metric Value
Total Samples 2,200
Prompt Length (Mean) 83.89 chars
Prompt Length (Min/Max) 17 / 423 chars

Per-Subset Statistics:

Subset Samples Prompt Mean Prompt Min Prompt Max
speech_QA 400 64.33 23 148
speech_dialogue_QA 400 77.03 29 206
sound_QA 400 73.29 17 166
sound_generation_QA 100 222.52 130 423
music_QA 400 57.54 24 202
music_generation_analysis_QA 100 267.52 148 395
speech_and_sound_QA 200 63.98 25 127
speech_and_music_QA 200 69.37 32 127

Audio Statistics:

Metric Value
Total Audio Files 2,200
Audio per Sample min: 1, max: 1, mean: 1
Formats mp3, wav

Sample Example

Subset: speech_QA

{
  "input": [
    {
      "id": "5781ee73",
      "content": [
        {
          "audio": "/root/.cache/modelscope/hub/datasets/evalscope/AIR-Bench-Dataset/Chat/speech_QA_iemocap/Ses01F_script01_1_M025.wav",
          "format": "wav"
        },
        {
          "text": "Who is the speaker addressing at the end of the speech?"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "target": "The speaker is addressing Mom at the end of the speech.",
  "id": 0,
  "group_id": 0,
  "subset_key": "speech_QA",
  "metadata": {
    "uniq_id": 400,
    "task_name": "speech_QA",
    "dataset_name": "iemocap",
    "category": "speech",
    "meta_info": "{'emotion': 'neutral', 'gender': 'male', 'transcription': \"And then we'll thrash it out with father. Okay Mom? Don't avoid me.\"}",
    "question": "Who is the speaker addressing at the end of the speech?"
  }
}

Prompt Template

Prompt Template:

{question}

Extra Parameters

Parameter Type Default Description
tasks list None Optional list of Chat task names to evaluate (subset of ['music_QA', 'music_generation_analysis_QA', 'sound_QA', 'sound_generation_QA', 'speech_QA', 'speech_and_music_QA', 'speech_and_sound_QA', 'speech_dialogue_QA']). Defaults to all tasks.
do_swap bool True When True (default), each sample is judged twice with the order of reference vs. prediction swapped, then scores are averaged. Disable to halve judge cost at the price of position bias.

Usage

Using CLI

evalscope eval \
    --model YOUR_MODEL \
    --api-url OPENAI_API_COMPAT_URL \
    --api-key EMPTY_TOKEN \
    --datasets air_bench_chat \
    --limit 10  # Remove this line for formal evaluation

Using Python

from evalscope import run_task
from evalscope.config import TaskConfig

task_cfg = TaskConfig(
    model='YOUR_MODEL',
    api_url='OPENAI_API_COMPAT_URL',
    api_key='EMPTY_TOKEN',
    datasets=['air_bench_chat'],
    dataset_args={
        'air_bench_chat': {
            # subset_list: ['speech_QA', 'speech_dialogue_QA', 'sound_QA']  # optional, evaluate specific subsets
            # extra_params: {}  # uses default extra parameters
        }
    },
    limit=10,  # Remove this line for formal evaluation
)

run_task(task_cfg=task_cfg)