Clotho-AQA
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.
- 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.
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:
- GPT-6 Astra
- Claude Opus 5.5
- GPT-6.1 Terra
- GPT-6.1 Sol
- and 16 more
- 1
ERNIE 5.0 73.7%
- 2
LongCat-Flash-Omni 72.8%
- 3 Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct 71.2%
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | | 73.7% | Feb 2026 | Model card | |
| 2 | | 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.
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
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.
| Date | Launch post | Score | As the post writes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31 Oct 2025 | 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.
| Date | Document | Score | As the document writes it | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 Feb 2026 | | 73.7 | ClothoAQA (Table 7) | Capabilities |
| 31 Oct 2025 | | 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
- Video-MMMU In use 300 expert-level lecture videos with questions testing perception, comprehension and adaptation of knowledge. Accuracy.
Qwen 3.8 Max 88.7%
- LVBench In use Hours-long video understanding with multiple-choice questions on reasoning, grounding and summarization.
Gemini 4 Argon 91.7%
- 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%