arXiv AI By Hyebin Cho, Suho Yoo, Jihoo Jung, Joon Son Chung

Tracing Audio Grounding and Answer Selection in Audio LLMs

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The paper investigates how Audio Large Language Models (Audio LLMs) actually use audio input to determine answers, rather than relying on textual cues. It finds that replacing audio with silence or unrelated audio degrades performance more after training than before, that acoustic information shapes representations in early-to-middle layers and influences final predictions in middle-to-late layers, and that training impacts specific layer bands most strongly. These observations offer a mechanistic view of how training enhances the use of acoustic evidence in Audio LLMs.

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