arXiv Computation and Language By Pei-Jun Liao, Hung-Shin Lee, Wenze Ren, Kuo-Hsuan Hung, Hung-yi Lee, Hsin-Min Wang

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

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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.

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