The paper investigates how different design choices in visual-head discovery scores affect the attention heads selected in vision‑language models. By systematically varying query type, discovery corpus, and attention source in Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct, the authors find that the attention source and query type have a larger impact on head selection than the corpus. While necessity scores distinguish discovery settings, steerability does not show a significant advantage over random head sets.
By Md Abdul Kadir, Daniel Sonntag
The study investigates the internal workings of an audio language model (Qwen3-Omni) by applying a logit lens to its middle layers. It finds that the model’s reasoning about spoken questions becomes legible in words before any token is emitted, revealing language‑agnostic, paralinguistic, and temporally distinct signals that are causally used in the network’s decision process. The authors demonstrate that these signals can be isolated and mapped to specific layers, providing a qualitative account of how the model processes audio input.
By Jiajun Fan, Jingyuan Li, Prashanth Gurunath Shivakumar, Qi Luo, Jia-Hong Huang, M. Maruf, Roger Ren, Yile Gu, Rahul Pandey, Ge Liu, Ivan Bulyko
arXiv:2607. 01002v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In long-context use, large language models frequently synthesize answers from the meaning of a relevant context span rather than literally copy-pasting them.
By Aryo Pradipta Gema, Beatrice Alex, Pasquale Minervini
The paper introduces Triage, a method that predicts the attention distribution of audio tokens before a language model processes them, enabling early pruning of less important tokens. By fitting a linear map to encoder outputs, Triage achieves high correlation (ρ ≥ 0.69) with full-model attention across eleven of thirteen large audio language models. Using this prediction, Triage compresses audio inputs while maintaining near‑full performance, outperforming baselines in transcription accuracy and significantly increasing the amount of audio that fits within a model’s context window.
By Kyoungjun Park, Yunzhe Li, Lili Qiu
arXiv:2510.00628v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large audio-language models (LALMs) are often used in tasks that involve reasoning over ordered options. An open question is whether their pr...
By Yu-Xiang Lin, Chen-An Li, Sheng-Lun Wei, Po-Chun Chen, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Hung-yi Lee
The paper investigates what open audio‑language models actually attend to when judging generated music. By designing four probes—removing audio, swapping clips, changing clip order, and rewording instructions—the authors test whether the models respond to the music, the text prompt, or the question framing. Across five judges and thousands of clips, the results show that most models rely on the prompt alone, only a few follow the audio for prompt alignment, and instruction wording can shift correlations as much as changing the model itself.
By Mateusz Modrzejewski, Tomasz Radzikowski
arXiv:2609.30483v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Audio language models state numbers for acoustic quantities, and neither human opinion nor a judge model says whether such a number is true of the si...
By Sheng-Tse Lin, Siyuan Zhai, Chien-Liang Kuo, Massa Baali, Bhiksha Raj
The paper investigates the reliability of attention‑head ablation as a causal inference tool in language models. Using GPT‑2 small, the authors find that a natural post‑projection zeroing method is almost uncorrelated with a corrected pre‑projection ablation and yields a completely different set of top‑5 important heads. They also show that binary accuracy can mask effects near performance floors or ceilings, whereas gold‑token log‑probability provides a graded signal. By employing a discovery/held‑out split and 1,000 matched random‑head and layer‑matched‑head controls, the corrected per‑head effect ranking remains highly stable (Spearman ρ = 0.974) and the top‑5 heads significantly outperform both control distributions (Monte Carlo p = 0.001). However, evidence for task specificity is weak on GPT‑2, and replication on DistilGPT‑2 confirms the intervention‑semantic and matched‑control findings.
By Juli Huang
Qwen-Audio-Jev extends Qwen-Audio-3.1-ASR-Flash-Next with a dedicated decision head that unifies selection, binary judgment, and scoring into three primitives: CHOICE, NOUL, and SCORE. The model delivers competitive accuracies and error rates across 18 labeled configurations, achieving 78.70% on MMAU-mini, 84.06% on MMSU, 6.50% equal error rate on VoxCeleb1-O, and a 0.1062 normalized MAE on NISQA. Compared to its predecessor, Qwen-Audio-Jev offers roughly a 20‑fold inference speedup, enabling efficient high‑throughput audio decision‑making for tasks such as large‑scale screening, speaker verification, and automated quality assessment.
By Ying Fang, Zhifu Gao, Qing Gu, Jiajun He, Kangqi Jing, Xiangang Li, Yu Pu, Wupeng Wang
The paper introduces VideoRouteAudit, a controlled experiment that isolates the effects of frame selection, evidence injection, and expert routing in long‑video question answering. On a large Video‑MME benchmark, no frame selector outperforms uniform sampling, and the gains from evidence injection or model swapping are largely attributable to the specific model or data ordering rather than the selection strategy itself. The study also corrects earlier results, showing that ASR transcripts can either help or hurt performance depending on placement, and that swapping the answering model yields the largest performance contrast.
By Shih-Yao Lin
We benchmark eleven audio classification methods: five task-aware closed-set LLMs (four Gemini models plus open-weight Kimi-Audio-7B-Instruct), four fixed-vocabulary taggers (YAMNet, PANNs, Whisper-AT, and SSLAM), a zero-shot audio-text model (CLAP), and an audio-grounded LLM (BAT). We evaluate them on a closed-set sound-source identification task over 2,242 clips spanning 23 fine-grained classes and 11 categories.
arXiv:2609.36221v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The way a model distributes activity over each layer's attention heads offers a coarse view of how it routes information through depth; how this change...
By Johnny Jingze Li, Abdulla Kuleib, Kalyan Basu, Gabriel A. Silva