NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper
Massive Sound Embedding Benchmark (MSEB)
- Georg Heigold
- Ehsan Variani
- Tom Bagby
- Cyril Allauzen
- Ji Ma
- Shankar Kumar
- Michael D Riley
Audio is a critical component of multimodal perception, and any truly intelligent system must demonstrate a wide range of auditory capabilities. These capabilities include transcription, classification, retrieval, reasoning, segmentation, clustering, reranking, and reconstruction. Fundamentally, each task involves transforming a raw audio signal into a meaningful 'embedding'—be it a single vector, a sequence of continuous or discrete representations, or another structured form—which then serves as the basis for generating the task's final response. To accelerate progress towards robust machine auditory intelligence, we present the Massive Sound Embedding Benchmark (MSEB): an extensible framework designed to evaluate the auditory components of any multimodal system. In its first release, MSEB offers a comprehensive suite of eight core tasks, with more planned for the future, supported by diverse datasets, including the new, large-scale Simple Voice Questions (SVQ) dataset. Our initial experiments establish clear performance headrooms, highlighting the significant opportunity to improve real-world multimodal experiences where audio is a core signal. We encourage the research community to use MSEB to assess their algorithms and contribute to its growth. The library is publicly hosted at https: //github. com/google-research/mseb.