Incongruence-Aware Evaluation of Multimodal Speech Emotion Recognition in Audio Large Language Models

arXiv:2610.40883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Voice-interactive large language models process both what a speaker says and how they say it, yet the two channels do not always agree. We ask whether that disagreement degrades speech emotion recognition. Mapping text and audio into a shared valence-arousal-dominance space, we convert the distance between them into a continuous, threshold-free incongruence score with a two-component Gaussian mixture, and validate the score against human judgement. We evaluate three audiocapable models on acted, conversational and spontaneous speech (eNTERFACE'05, MELD and CMU-MOSEI).