arXiv AI

Listen Then Reason: Perception-Grounded Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv AI
Sep 23

When Scaling Fails: Mitigating Audio Perception Decay of LALMs via Multi-Step Perception-Aware Reasoning

arXiv:2603.02266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Test-Time Scaling has shown notable efficacy in addressing complex problems through scaling inference compute. However, within Large Audio-La...

By Ruixiang Mao, Xiangnan Ma, Dan Chen, Ziming Zhu, Yuan Ge, Aokai Hao, Haishu Zhao, Yifu Huo, Qing Yang, Kaiyan Chang, Xiaoqian Liu, Chenglong Wang, Qiaozhi He, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

RetroThinker: Enabling Retrospective Thinking in Speech LLMs

RetroThinker is a multi-stage post‑training framework that enhances SpeechLLMs by enabling them to self‑verify and forward‑correct Chain‑of‑Thought reasoning steps during inference. It combines supervised fine‑tuning on curated retrospective thinking data with length‑based direct preference optimization to improve reasoning while the user speaks. On the GSM8K benchmark, RetroThinker achieves an 11% absolute accuracy gain over non‑retrospective baselines while maintaining comparable latency.

By Yi-Jen Shih, Puyuan Peng, Abdelrahman Mohamed, David Harwath
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 17

A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 17417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on a variety of audio understanding tasks but continue to struggle with temporal reasoning, a fundamental capability central to human auditory perception.

By Apoorva Kulkarni, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Sreyan Ghosh, Sarah Wiegreffe, Dinesh Manocha, Ramani Duraiswami
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 24

X$^3$-OPD: Distilling Reasoning into Large Audio-Language Models via On-Policy Alignment

arXiv:2607. 21550v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While large audio-language models have achieved remarkable progress in auditory perception, they still lag behind text-based large language models in deep logical reasoning, primarily due to the scarcity of high-quality audio reasoning data.

By Dongjie Fu, Di Cao, Xize Cheng, Zihan Zhang, Wenxu Jia, Yifu Chen, Shengpeng Ji, Yu Zhang, Tao Jin
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Tracing Audio Grounding and Answer Selection in Audio LLMs

The paper investigates how Audio Large Language Models (Audio LLMs) actually use audio input to determine answers, rather than relying on textual cues. It finds that replacing audio with silence or unrelated audio degrades performance more after training than before, that acoustic information shapes representations in early-to-middle layers and influences final predictions in middle-to-late layers, and that training impacts specific layer bands most strongly. These observations offer a mechanistic view of how training enhances the use of acoustic evidence in Audio LLMs.

By Hyebin Cho, Suho Yoo, Jihoo Jung, Joon Son Chung
arXiv AI
Aug 10

MetaSICL: Globalizing Auditory LLMs for Underserved Speakers and Languages via Meta Speech In-Context Learning

arXiv:2601. 18904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative AI for speech and audio is increasingly expected to serve users across languages, cultures, and communities, yet current auditory Large Language Models (LLMs) are still largely trained and evaluated on high-resource data.

By Haolong Zheng, Siyin Wang, Zengrui Jin, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
arXiv AI
Jun 11

RAIL: Rethinking Auditory Intelligence in Large Audio-Language Models with a CHC-Grounded Benchmark

arXiv:2606. 11260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans process rich auditory environments through tightly integrated cognitive capabilities such as audio perception, audio reasoning, and memory.

By Hongyu Jin, Siyi Wang, Yang Xiao, Jiaheng Dong, Shihong Tan, Kaiyuan peng, Georgiana Juravle, Shanquan Chen, Gongping Huang, Hong Jia, Eun-Jung Holden, James Bailey, Ting Dang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 24

From Sounds to Scenes: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context-Aware Auditory Scene Understanding in Large Audio Language Models

Recent Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have achieved remarkable progress in audio perceptual tasks across individual acoustic layers, including speech, sound, and music. However, existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate these layers in isolation, overlooking the complex contextual relationships that arise when multiple acoustic sources co-occur in real-world auditory scenes.