arXiv Computation and Language

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

AURAL: Adaptive Latent Reasoning with Joint Chunk for Speech Language Models

AURAL is a speech language model that performs adaptive latent reasoning by modeling multiple plausible reasoning continuations in latent space and jointly predicting chunks of future states, thereby reducing sequential forward passes and latency. The authors introduce a large bilingual dataset, AuralReason-683K, containing concise chain‑of‑thought annotations for emotion recognition, empathetic dialogue, and general reasoning, and use reinforcement learning (AURAL‑RL) to reward concise, high‑quality reasoning that adapts to problem difficulty. Experiments on two backbones show that AURAL‑RL matches or exceeds chain‑of‑thought reinforcement learning while achieving significant latency reductions, such as an 11.8× speed‑up on Qwen2.5‑Omni. "whyItMatters":"The work demonstrates that latent reasoning can match the performance of explicit chain‑of‑thought methods while dramatically cutting response time, addressing the trade‑off between intelligence and speed in speech language models."

By Yuxiang Wang, Kunyu Feng, Yuancheng Wang, Zihang Liu, Shengbo Cai, Qinke Ni, Wan Lin, Tao Feng, Yingda shen, Ming-Hao Hsu, Zhixian Zhao, Liqiang Zhang, Teddy Sun, Steve Yves, Zhizheng Wu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

Spoken Language Models that Think Aloud

arXiv:2609.26488v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has improved the capability of language models, directly applying it to Spoken Language Models (SLMs) may introd...

By Junyi Ao, Kainan Peng, Mingbo Ma, Shun Zhang, Zhenyu Tang, Xutai Ma, Xiang Li, Yinghao Li, Yuancheng Wang, Zhizheng Wu, Haizhou Li, Qing He, Xubo Liu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Self-Speculation for Faster Reasoning Models

arXiv:2608.20359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are deployed for increasingly complex tasks involving planning and multi-step decision making, but high-quality performanc...

By Ravisri Valluri, Tung Nguyen, Aditya Grover
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

COT-TTS: Audio Context-Aware Text-to-Speech with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

arXiv:2609.22697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently, text-to-speech systems have made significant progress in speech expressiveness and controllability. However, the speaking style of generated...

By Weizhen Bian, Sitong Cheng, Rongxiu Zhong, Jiahao Pan, Liumeng Xue, Boyi Kang, Shilei Zhang, Jinglei Liu, Yue Wang, Junlan Feng, Bei Liu, Wei Xue
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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 22

Efficient Chain-of-Modality Reasoning via Progressive Compression for Spoken Language Models

Spoken language models (SLMs) enable natural human-computer interaction, but their reasoning ability still lags behind that of text-based large language models, especially on spoken mathematical question answering tasks. One important reason is that SLMs reason over purely verbalized mathematical expressions, which are harder to interpret than symbolic text.