HumMusQA
Models answer 320 hand-written questions about music, curated and checked by people with musical training.
The paper also tests robustness to uni-modal shortcuts.
In the authors’ words
The evaluation of music understanding in Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) requires a rigorously defined benchmark that truly tests whether models can perceive and interpret music, a standard that current data methodologies frequently fail to meet. This paper introduces a meticulously structured approach to music evaluation, proposing a new dataset of 320 hand-written questions curated and validated by experts with musical training, arguing that such focused, manual curation is superior for probing complex audio comprehension. To demonstrate the use of the dataset, we benchmark six state-of-the-art LALMs and additionally test their robustness to uni-modal shortcuts.
- Level
- Expert Specialists with years of training, often over hours of work
- Scored
- Checked automatically A program checks the result against an answer key, unit tests or the expected final state.
- Answers
- Multiple choice
Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash leads with 75.8%
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.
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | | 75.8% | Sep 2026 | Model card |
Scores over time
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
One lab put it in a launch post in the last six months
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18 Sep 2026 | 75.8 | HumMusQA Music Understanding |
One system card reports it
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 Sep 2026 | | 75.8 | HumMusQA (Table 4) | 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%