VCB Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for Audio-Grounded Large Language Model Conversational Agents

While large audio language models (LALMs) have driven significant progress in multimodal conversational systems, current benchmarks suffer from critical limitations: they are largely English-centric, use synthetic speech, and fail to provide comprehensive, discriminative evaluation across key dimensions.To fill this gap, we present Voice Chat Bot Bench (VCB Bench), a novel, high-quality Chinese benchmark built exclusively on real human speech.VCB Bench assesses LALMs across three complementary axes: instruction following (including speechlevel control beyond text commands), knowledge understanding (including general knowledge, reasoning, and daily dialogue), and robustness (evaluating stability under variations in content, environment, and speaker characteristics).Experiments conducted on representative LALMs reveal notable performance disparities and offer tangible insights for future improvements.VCB Bench serves as a reproducible and fine-grained framework, providing standardized evaluation and practical guidance for the development of Chinese voice conversational models. 1