Evaluating the emotional intelligence (EI) of audio language models (ALMs) is critical. However, existing benchmarks mostly rely on synthesized speech, are limited to single-turn interactions, and depend heavily on open-ended scoring. This paper proposes HumDial-EIBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating ALMs' EI. Using real-recorded human dialogues from the ICASSP 2026 HumDial Challenge, it reformulates emotional tracking and causal reasoning into multiple-choice questions with adversarial distractors, mitigating subjective scoring bias for cognitive tasks. It retains the generation of empathetic responses and introduces an acoustic-semantic conflict task to assess robustness against contradictory multimodal signals. Evaluations of eight ALMs reveal that most models struggle with multi-turn emotional tracking and implicit causal reasoning. Furthermore, all models exhibit decoupled textual and acoustic empathy, alongside a severe text-dominance bias during cross-modal conflicts.
@article{arxiv.2604.11594,
title = {HumDial-EIBench: A Human-Recorded Multi-Turn Emotional Intelligence Benchmark for Audio Language Models},
author = {Shuiyuan Wang and Zhixian Zhao and Hongfei Xue and Chengyou Wang and Shuai Wang and Hui Bu and Xin Xu and Lei Xie},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.11594},
year = {2026}
}