When Text Misleads: Inconsistent-Aware Reasoning for Audio-Grounded Dialogue

Abstract

Understanding spoken dialogue requires joint reasoning over lexical content and paralinguistic acoustic signals such as emotion and conversational intent. However, existing evaluations often allow shortcuts based on transcripts or single-modality solutions, obscuring whether models genuinely ground predictions in speech. We formalize this failure mode as cross-modal disagreement, where transcripts suggest plausible but incorrect surface interpretations while acoustic cues such as prosody or speaking style support different answers. We develop a scalable framework that identifies text-biased surface interpretations and converts disagreement regions into conflict QA examples. We also include consistent cases where transcript-based and speech-grounded interpretations agree, enabling evaluation beyond adversarial audio dependence. This results in ContraTalk, a controlled benchmark containing 501 questions across five discourse dimensions: interaction behavior, emotion state, dialogue act, social stance, and conversational intent. We further develop an agentic-style reasoning framework that converts speech into an Audio Twin, a text-readable representation of localized acoustic cues that exposes acoustic evidence to the reasoning model. Experiments show that strong text-only LLMs exceed 90% accuracy in consistent cases but drop to 33-48% in conflict cases. Direct AudioLLMs provide only partial grounding, still selecting the transcript-biased trap in roughly 30-40% of conflict cases. Our Audio Twin framework improves conflict-case accuracy while reducing trap selection, but its consistent-case behavior remains backbone-dependent. These results identify transcript-based shortcuts as an important failure mode in spoken dialogue understanding and show that explicit acoustic evidence aggregation provides a more controllable interface for diagnosing and improving speech-grounded reasoning.