arXiv Computation and Language

What Does LALM Post-training Learn? Rethinking Audio Understanding and Reasoning Capabilities

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 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
Oct 27

Audio-R1: Audio Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning on Self-Supervised Tasks

Audio-R1 is a reinforcement learning post‑training framework that leverages audio self‑supervised learning tasks to provide verifiable rewards for large audio‑language models. By automatically determining answers during task construction, Audio‑R1 verifies model responses and computes rewards, leading to consistent performance gains across multiple models and audio benchmarks. Ablation studies show each self‑supervised task contributes to the improvement, and joint training yields additional benefits, especially on downstream tasks distinct from the training tasks.

By Jihoon Jeong, Mirco Ravanelli, Zhepei Wang, Cem Subakan
arXiv AI
Jun 30

ORCA: Open-ended Response Correctness Assessment for Audio Question Answering

arXiv:2512. 09066v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable assessment of the abilities of large audio language models (LALMs) is essential to advancing the state of the art.

By \v{S}imon Sedl\'a\v{c}ek, Sara Barahona, Bolaji Yusuf, Laura Herrera-Alarc\'on, Santosh Kesiraju, Cecilia Bola\~nos, Alicia Lozano-Diez, Sathvik Udupa, Fernando L\'opez, Allison Ferner, Ramani Duraiswami, Jan \v{C}ernock\'y
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
Oct 7

AdaLoop: Adaptive-Depth Latent Reasoning for Audio Language Models

AdaLoop is a lightweight recurrent module that adaptively determines how many latent refinement steps are needed for audio–question pairs, allowing deeper reasoning only when necessary. It shares a transformer block that iterates over the audio representation guided by the question, with a learned halting mechanism that exits the loop once the representation is ready. Adding fewer than 3 % of the base model’s parameters, AdaLoop improves average accuracy by 2.9 to 3.8 points across three distinct models, especially on perception-heavy subtasks.

By Lee Seung-woo, Bowen Qi