Benchmark Almanac

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.

Released
March 2026
Kind
Audio understanding and voice
Level
Expert
Scored
Checked automatically
Answers
Multiple choice
Tasks
All public
Last in a launch post
September 2026
Last model added
September 2026

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.

Abstract of HumMusQA: A Human-written Music Understanding QA Benchmark Dataset (arXiv:2603.27877, CC0)
1
Model scored in lab cards
1
Launch post lists it, from 1 lab
1
System card reports it, from 1 lab

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.

  1. 1 Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash 75.8%

Source: Labs’ model cards

#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash 75.8% Sep 2026 Lab model card

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
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Near the ceiling (85%) Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Near the ceiling (85%) Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash

Source: Labs’ model cards

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.

Qwen
DateLaunch postScoreAs the post writes it
Sep 18, 2026 Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash 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.

DateDocumentScoreAs the document writes itSection
Sep 22, 2026 Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash technical report 75.8 HumMusQA (Table 4) Capabilities

More in Audio and video

All 233 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%
  • FLEURS In use Models transcribe read speech in 102 languages built from FLoRes-101 sentences. Model cards usually report word error rate, so lower scores are better. Phi-4-multimodal 4.00%
  • 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%