Benchmark Almanac

Clotho-AQA

ERNIE 5.0 73.7% leads since Feb 2026 Dropped

Models answer crowdsourced yes or no and single word questions about short environmental audio clips. Scored by accuracy.

In the authors’ words

Audio question answering (AQA) is a multimodal translation task where a system analyzes an audio signal and a natural language question, to generate a desirable natural language answer. In this paper, we introduce Clotho-AQA, a dataset for Audio question answering consisting of 1991 audio files each between 15 to 30 seconds in duration selected from the Clotho dataset. For each audio file, we collect six different questions and corresponding answers by crowdsourcing using Amazon Mechanical Turk. The questions and answers are produced by different annotators. Out of the six questions for each audio, two questions each are designed to have 'yes' and 'no' as answers, while the remaining two questions have other single-word answers. For each question, we collect answers from three different annotators. We also present two baseline experiments to describe the usage of our dataset for the AQA task - an LSTM-based multimodal binary classifier for 'yes' or 'no' type answers and an LSTM-based multimodal multi-class classifier for 828 single-word answers. The binary classifier achieved an accuracy of 62.7% and the multi-class classifier achieved a top-1 accuracy of 54.2% and a top-5 accuracy of 93.7%. Clotho-AQA dataset is freely available online at https://zenodo.org/record/6473207.

Abstract of Clotho-AQA: A Crowdsourced Dataset for Audio Question Answering (arXiv:2204.09634, CC0)
Made by Tampere University (Lipping, Sudarsanam et al.) Released Apr 2022 Audio understanding and voice All tasks public Last in a launch post Oct 2025 , dropped before it saturated Last model added Feb 2026
Level
Everyday Most adults, without training
Scored
Checked automatically A program checks the result against an answer key, unit tests or the expected final state.
Answers
Short answer A number, word or short string matched to a key.
3
Models scored in lab cards
2
Launch posts list it, from 2 labs
3
System cards report it, from 3 labs

ERNIE 5.0 leads with 73.7% among models released by Jan 2026

Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.

The newest model with a score here came out in Jan 2026, and nobody has reported a newer one. Among the 20 highest-ranked models on the capability index, these have no score yet:

  1. 1 ERNIE 5.0 73.7%
  2. 2 LongCat-Flash-Omni 72.8%
  3. 3 Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct 71.2%
#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 ERNIE 5.0 73.7% Feb 2026 Model card
2 LongCat-Flash-Omni 72.8% Oct 2025 Model card
3 Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct 71.2% Apr 2025 Model card

3 models have held number one since 2023

Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.

Moonshot AI Meituan Baidu
Lab claims Not tested since Feb 2026
ERNIE 5.0 73.7%

Scores over time

All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.

Reported by the lab in its model card Best so far
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2025 2026 Near the ceiling (85%) ERNIE 5.0 LongCat-Flash-Omni Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2025 2026 Near the ceiling (85%) ERNIE 5.0 Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct

No launch post has listed it since Oct 2025

Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.

Moonshot AI
Meituan
DateLaunch postScoreAs the post writes it
31 Oct 2025 LongCat-Flash-Omni 72.8 ClothoAQA
25 Apr 2025 Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct 71.2 ClothoAQA test (dev 73.18)

3 system cards report it, from 3 labs

Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.

DateDocumentScoreAs the document writes itSection
4 Feb 2026 ERNIE 5.0 technical report 73.7 ClothoAQA (Table 7) Capabilities
31 Oct 2025 LongCat-Flash-Omni technical report 72.8 ClothoAQA (Table 10) Capabilities
25 Apr 2025 Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct technical report 71.2 ClothoAQA test (Table 5). Dev 73.18 Capabilities

More in Audio and video

All 168 in Audio and video
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  • MMVU In use 3,000 expert-annotated questions on videos across 27 disciplines. Multiple-choice and open-ended accuracy. Qwen 3.8 Max 82.4%
  • MLVU In use Multi-task long video understanding (minutes to hours) with multiple-choice and generation tasks. Accuracy. Qwen 3.8 Max 90.8%
  • VoiceBench In use Spoken instructions with speaker, environment and content variation. Voice assistant responses scored by GPT judge or rules. Qwen3.5-Omni-Plus 93.1%
  • TVBench In use Models answer multiple-choice questions on 10 temporal video tasks, such as action counting and ordering, that static frames cannot solve. Scored by accuracy. Qwen 3.8 Max 81.9%