MixCards: Evaluating Structured Descriptions of Multi-Source Sound Scenes

Audio captioning benchmarks typically evaluate a single unstructured free-text description of an audio scene, providing limited insight into how a model fails to understand polyphonic audio. A plausible caption may omit a source, or conflate multiple sources into one, or assign an attribute of one source to another, and conventional captioning evaluation cannot locate these errors. We introduce MixCardsBench, a benchmark for structured captioning of polyphonic audio, which evaluates models in two stages: first, identifying and temporally localizing the sources in a scene, and second, generating a structured MixCard describing the semantic, temporal, and acoustic properties of each source. The benchmark contains 4884 ecologically plausible synthetic soundscapes with up to eight overlapping speech, music and sound effects sources built from high-quality recordings and source-level annotations, where each source has a reference MixCard. We evaluate six state-of-the-art large audio language models and find substantial limitations in current models, which struggle considerably with speech and sound effects timing and detection, with the strongest model reaching only around 60% mean card-field score. Performance varies significantly across attributes, exposing capability differences that are hidden by aggregate caption scores. We assess the quality and ecological validity of MixCardBench through human validation, distribution matching and a listening study, and shows that human corrections have little effect on model rankings, and our synthesized soundscapes are closer to in-the-wild YouTube videos than source guided but otherwise random synthesis. https://mixcards-anon.github.io/mixcards-demo/