arXiv Machine Learning

Inherited Heads: Audio language models track speakers with their text backbone's attention, and an attention-mass ranking retrieves a different set

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Can We Read the Mind of an Audio LLM? A Verbalizable, Multilingual Middle-Layer Workspace

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 3

Can Foundation Models Hear What Made That Sound? A Tiered Benchmark of Audio-Language Models and Traditional Classifiers for Closed-Set Sound Source Identification

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 Machine Learning
Sep 11

Detectable Only Where It Is Confounded: What Verified Duplication Counts Say About Membership Evidence in Language Models

The paper investigates whether language models can identify sentences from their training data by using exact duplication counts from publicly released corpora for two model families, OLMo‑2 and Pythia. It finds that for typical duplication levels, models show only a weak trace of exposure, with a rank correlation near –0.08, and that strong signals only appear when a sentence appears roughly a thousand times, at which point fame rather than memory dominates. The study also demonstrates that common membership tests can be misleading, as changing a single word does not alter the model’s preference, and that controlling for register can significantly improve detector performance.

By Arman Nik Khah
arXiv AI
Sep 10

TamilEOT: A Dataset and Model for Semantic End-of-Turn Detection in Tamil Telephone Speech

TamilEOT is a new dataset and two audio‑only models for detecting semantic end‑of‑turn in Tamil telephone speech, comprising 18,485 labeled turn boundaries from 116 real conversations. The models, fine‑tuned from Smart Turn v3, achieve 83.71% and 86.13% accuracy on a held‑out set, with ROC‑AUC rising from 0.751 to 0.921, and run in under 150 ms on a laptop CPU. The paper also reports the cost of building the dataset, the accuracy of rule‑derived labels versus human agreement, and the impact of encoder capacity on performance. whyItMatters":"The study provides the first publicly available Tamil end‑of‑turn detection resource, enabling more accurate voice agents for South Indian languages and demonstrating efficient, low‑latency models that outperform zero‑shot baselines."

By Santhoshkumar V
arXiv Computation and Language
1d ago

Correlation-Guided Encoder Selection for Multi-Encoder Large Audio-Language Models

The paper introduces CUES, a lightweight heuristic for selecting encoder combinations in large audio‑language models by estimating complementarity through Pearson correlations of single‑encoder performance profiles. Using a frozen SmolLM2‑135M backbone, CUES consistently identifies optimal encoder sets for each track on the XARES‑LLM benchmark without requiring fusion training or test data. On broad audio tasks, CUES selects a diverse trio of encoders, improving performance by 4.3% over Whisper‑medium, while on text generation it opts for a focused speech‑only pair, outperforming mHuBERT‑147 by 6.3%. The results illustrate how correlation signals guide a diversity–interference trade‑off across different task families.

By Pei-Jun Liao, Hung-Shin Lee, Wenze Ren, Kuo-Hsuan Hung, Hung-yi Lee, Hsin-Min Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 25

XTC: Head-Aware Sampling by Excluding Top Choices

XTC (Exclude Top Choices) is a lightweight, head‑aware decoding operator that improves diversity in autoregressive language models by removing overly probable tokens that dominate the next‑token distribution. It works by identifying tokens above a plausibility threshold, probabilistically excluding the dominant choices, and renormalizing the remaining distribution. Across 60 experiments on models such as Gemma 3 and DeepSeek R1, XTC boosts Distinct‑2 scores by 11–15 % and cuts repeat trigrams by 27–47 %, while a Mechanical Turk study shows a 62.3 % preference for XTC‑generated text without loss of fluency.

By Philipp Emanuel Weidmann, Allen Roush, Judah Goldfeder, Sanjay Basu, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 3

Floor, Ceiling, and the Fusion Gap: How Much of Crowd Reading Attention Can Machines Predict?

A benchmark score means nothing without knowing what a trivial method achieves and what the best possible method could achieve. We construct both bounds for a task with a rare kind of ground truth: predicting which sentences a crowd of readers -- highlighting for their own purposes, unpaid, uninstructed, and blind to each other -- marked in 120 web documents.