arXiv Computation and Language By Yi-Jen Shih, Puyuan Peng, Abdelrahman Mohamed, David Harwath

RetroThinker: Enabling Retrospective Thinking in Speech LLMs

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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.

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