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MAEB: Massive Audio Embedding Benchmark

Adnan El Assadi, Isaac Chung, Chenghao Xiao, Roman Solomatin, Animesh Jha, Rahul Chand, Silky Singh, Kaitlyn Wang, Ali Sartaz Khan, Marc Moussa Nasser, Sufen Fong, Pengfei He, Alan Xiao, Ayush Sunil Munot, Aditya Shrivastava, Artem Gazizov, Niklas Muennighoff, Kenneth Enevoldsen · Feb 17, 2026 · Citations: 0

How to use this page

Low trust

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Read the full paper before copying any benchmark, metric, or protocol choices.

Evidence quality

Low

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

We introduce the Massive Audio Embedding Benchmark (MAEB), a large-scale benchmark covering 30 tasks across speech, music, environmental sounds, and cross-modal audio-text reasoning in 100+ languages. We evaluate 50+ models and find that no single model dominates across all tasks: contrastive audio-text models excel at environmental sound classification (e.g., ESC50) but score near random on multilingual speech tasks (e.g., SIB-FLEURS), while speech-pretrained models show the opposite pattern. Clustering remains challenging for all models, with even the best-performing model achieving only modest results. We observe that models excelling on acoustic understanding often perform poorly on linguistic tasks, and vice versa. We also show that the performance of audio encoders on MAEB correlates highly with their performance when used in audio large language models. MAEB is derived from MAEB+, a collection of 98 tasks. MAEB is designed to maintain task diversity while reducing evaluation cost, and it integrates into the MTEB ecosystem for unified evaluation across text, image, and audio modalities. We release MAEB and all 98 tasks along with code and a leaderboard at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.

Abstract-only analysis — low confidence

All signals on this page are inferred from the abstract only and may be inaccurate. Do not use this page as a primary protocol reference.

  • This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.
  • The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.
  • The abstract does not clearly name benchmarks or metrics.

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

0/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 35%

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"We introduce the Massive Audio Embedding Benchmark (MAEB), a large-scale benchmark covering 30 tasks across speech, music, environmental sounds, and cross-modal audio-text reasoning in 100+ languages."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"We introduce the Massive Audio Embedding Benchmark (MAEB), a large-scale benchmark covering 30 tasks across speech, music, environmental sounds, and cross-modal audio-text reasoning in 100+ languages."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"We introduce the Massive Audio Embedding Benchmark (MAEB), a large-scale benchmark covering 30 tasks across speech, music, environmental sounds, and cross-modal audio-text reasoning in 100+ languages."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"We introduce the Massive Audio Embedding Benchmark (MAEB), a large-scale benchmark covering 30 tasks across speech, music, environmental sounds, and cross-modal audio-text reasoning in 100+ languages."

Reported Metrics

missing

Not extracted

No metric anchors detected.

"We introduce the Massive Audio Embedding Benchmark (MAEB), a large-scale benchmark covering 30 tasks across speech, music, environmental sounds, and cross-modal audio-text reasoning in 100+ languages."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: Coding, Multilingual

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Low
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

No metric terms were extracted from the available abstract.

Research Brief

Metadata summary

We introduce the Massive Audio Embedding Benchmark (MAEB), a large-scale benchmark covering 30 tasks across speech, music, environmental sounds, and cross-modal audio-text reasoning in 100+ languages.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • We introduce the Massive Audio Embedding Benchmark (MAEB), a large-scale benchmark covering 30 tasks across speech, music, environmental sounds, and cross-modal audio-text reasoning in 100+ languages.
  • We evaluate 50+ models and find that no single model dominates across all tasks: contrastive audio-text models excel at environmental sound classification (e.g., ESC50) but score near random on multilingual speech tasks (e.g., SIB-FLEURS), while speech-pretrained models show the opposite pattern.
  • Clustering remains challenging for all models, with even the best-performing model achieving only modest results.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • We introduce the Massive Audio Embedding Benchmark (MAEB), a large-scale benchmark covering 30 tasks across speech, music, environmental sounds, and cross-modal audio-text reasoning in 100+ languages.
  • We evaluate 50+ models and find that no single model dominates across all tasks: contrastive audio-text models excel at environmental sound classification (e.g., ESC50) but score near random on multilingual speech tasks (e.g., SIB-FLEURS),…
  • MAEB is designed to maintain task diversity while reducing evaluation cost, and it integrates into the MTEB ecosystem for unified evaluation across text, image, and audio modalities.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • We introduce the Massive Audio Embedding Benchmark (MAEB), a large-scale benchmark covering 30 tasks across speech, music, environmental sounds, and cross-modal audio-text reasoning in 100+ languages.
  • MAEB is designed to maintain task diversity while reducing evaluation cost, and it integrates into the MTEB ecosystem for unified evaluation across text, image, and audio modalities.

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Gap: Metric reporting is present

    No metric terms extracted.

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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