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arXiv Computation and Language By Wei-Chih Chen, Chien-yu Huang, Hung-yi Lee

Causal Tracing of Audio-Text Fusion in Large Audio Language Models

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

The study applies causal tracing to large audio language models (LALMs) to uncover how they fuse acoustic and textual information. Layer‑wise analysis reveals distinct fusion strategies—progressive integration in DeSTA versus abrupt late‑stage fusion in Qwen—while token‑wise analysis identifies the final sequence token as an informational bottleneck that decisively retrieves audio content. Additionally, an attention‑like query mechanism at intermediate tokens is observed, prompting the model to pull task‑relevant audio context.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computation and Language.

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