Title:TORUS: A Test of Rendering-Understanding Self-Coherence for Unified Audio Models

Abstract:Unified audio models capable of audio understanding, audio generation and, increasingly, audio editing are proliferating rapidly. Yet a basic question about them remains unanswered: do the two heads of a unified model agree about the same audio? Current practice evaluates each capability in isolation on specialized benchmarks, and never asks whether a model can make sense of its own generations. We present TORUS, the first self-coherence test for audio-native unified models. TORUS comprises 48 three-stage self-coherence tests carrying 432 six-option questions spanning speech, sound and music across five task families. We holistically evaluate five open unified models alongside a Cascaded Baseline that combines state-of-the-art specialized generation, editing and understanding models. The best unified model answers 50.5% of questions against the Cascaded Baseline's 63.2% and a 16.7% chance floor. Models struggle on audio editing. Among the evaluated audio models (specialized and unified), we observe limited self-coherence, and thus position self-coherence as an essential test for future audio systems.

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