arXiv Computation and Language October 22, 2026 By Eunsik Shin

Heard But Not Said: Prompting Understates Temporal Information of Musical Moments in Frozen Large Audio-Language Models

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Large audio‑language models (LALMs) can understand music but struggle to pinpoint a described moment in time. Using a paired‑query probe on Slakh2100 stem activations, researchers attached state and change queries to the same audio span and varied preceding context. Across frozen LALMs, different extraction methods (full‑track prompting, windowed yes/no scoring, and attention) revealed that state queries perform well without context, while change queries benefit from preceding audio in most short‑segment models; however, 30‑second padded encoders show no comparable recovery, and prompting or attention alone expose almost none of this capability.

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