# Audio-CoT: Exploring Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Audio Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07246 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07246/

## Key facts

- Cited by 62 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio-language model reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 36 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Audio-language model reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/audio-language-model-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03493/) (2022)
- [Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07919/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-Audio Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10759/) (2024)
- [SALMONN: Towards Generic Hearing Abilities for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13289/) (2023)
- [MMAU: A Massive Multi-Task Audio Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19168/) (2024)
- [AIR-Bench: Benchmarking Large Audio-Language Models via Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07729/) (2024)
- [Generated Knowledge Prompting for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08387/) (2021)
- [Audio Flamingo: A Novel Audio Language Model with Few-Shot Learning and Dialogue Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01831/) (2024)
- [Navigate through Enigmatic Labyrinth A Survey of Chain of Thought Reasoning: Advances, Frontiers and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15402/) (2023)
- [GAMA: A Large Audio-Language Model with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11768/) (2024)
- [On decoder-only architecture for speech-to-text and large language model integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03917/) (2023)
- [ExpertPrompting: Instructing Large Language Models to be Distinguished Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14688/) (2023)
- [Prompting Large Language Models with Speech Recognition Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11795/) (2023)
- [AudioBench: A Universal Benchmark for Audio Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16020/) (2024)
- [MAmmoTH-VL: Eliciting Multimodal Reasoning with Instruction Tuning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05237/) (2024)
- [M3CoT: A Novel Benchmark for Multi-Domain Multi-step Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16473/) (2024)
- [OmniBench: Towards The Future of Universal Omni-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15272/) (2024)
- [Dynamic-SUPERB: Towards A Dynamic, Collaborative, and Comprehensive Instruction-Tuning Benchmark for Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09510/) (2023)
- [Joint Audio and Speech Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14405/) (2023)
- [An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for LLM with Strong ASR Capacity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08846/) (2024)
- [Connecting Speech Encoder and Large Language Model for ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13963/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Speech Large Language Models for Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18908/) (2024)
- [Seed-ASR: Understanding Diverse Speech and Contexts with LLM-based Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04675/) (2024)
- [Prompting Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Domain Adaptation in Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16007/) (2023)
- [Sparks of Large Audio Models: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12792/) (2023)
- [Towards audio language modeling -- an overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13236/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09567/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12605/) (2025)
- [MMAR: A Challenging Benchmark for Deep Reasoning in Speech, Audio, Music, and Their Mix](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13032/) (2025)
- [Audio-Reasoner: Improving Reasoning Capability in Large Audio Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02318/) (2025)
- [Perception, Reason, Think, and Plan: A Survey on Large Multimodal Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04921/) (2025)
- [Reinforcement Learning Outperforms Supervised Fine-Tuning: A Case Study on Audio Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11197/) (2025)
- [DeSTA2.5-Audio: Toward General-Purpose Large Audio Language Model with Self-Generated Cross-Modal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02768/) (2025)
- [SARI: Structured Audio Reasoning via Curriculum-Guided Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15900/) (2025)
- [100 Days After DeepSeek-R1: A Survey on Replication Studies and More Directions for Reasoning Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00551/) (2025)
- [Audio-Thinker: Guiding Audio Language Model When and How to Think via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08039/) (2025)
- [VoiceAgentBench: Are Voice Assistants ready for agentic tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07978/) (2025)
- [WavReward: Spoken Dialogue Models With Generalist Reward Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09558/) (2025)
- [SoundMind: RL-Incentivized Logic Reasoning for Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12935/) (2025)
- [SpeechR: A Benchmark for Speech Reasoning in Large Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02018/) (2025)
- [Incentivizing Consistent, Effective and Scalable Reasoning Capability in Audio LLMs via Reasoning Process Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20867/) (2025)
- [MoshiRAG: Asynchronous Knowledge Retrieval for Full-Duplex Speech Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12928/) (2026)
- [Investigating Inference-time Scaling for Chain of Multi-modal Thought: A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11514/) (2025)
- [Understanding-in-Generation: Reinforcing Generative Capability of Unified Model via Infusing Understanding into Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18639/) (2025)
- [Citrus-V: Advancing Medical Foundation Models with Unified Medical Image Grounding for Clinical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19090/) (2025)
- [From Alignment to Advancement: Bootstrapping Audio-Language Alignment with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20166/) (2025)
- [LatentOmni: Rethinking Omni-Modal Understanding via Unified Audio-Visual Latent Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22012/) (2026)
- [The Interspeech 2026 Audio Reasoning Challenge: Evaluating Reasoning Process Quality for Audio Reasoning Models and Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14224/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Speech-to-Speech Dialogue Modeling with End-to-End Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00028/) (2025)
- [AURA: Agent for Understanding, Reasoning, and Automated Tool Use in Voice-Driven Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23049/) (2025)
- [Audio Flamingo Sound-CoT Technical Report: Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Sound Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11818/) (2025)
- [Pay More Attention To Audio: Mitigating Imbalance of Cross-Modal Attention in Large Audio Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18816/) (2025)
- [Walking Through Uncertainty: An Empirical Study of Uncertainty Estimation for Audio-Aware Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25591/) (2026)
- [Echo: Towards Advanced Audio Comprehension via Audio-Interleaved Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11909/) (2026)
- [Spatial Audio Question Answering and Reasoning on Dynamic Source Movements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16334/) (2026)
- [Audio-Zero: Label-Free Self-Evolution for Fine-Grained Audio Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20166/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in tasks involving audio perception and understanding, such as speech recognition and audio captioning. However, their reasoning capabilities - critical for solving complex real-world problems - remain underexplored. In this work, we conduct the first exploration into integrating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into LALMs to enhance their reasoning ability across auditory modalities. We evaluate representative CoT methods, analyzing their performance in both information extraction and reasoning tasks across sound, music, and speech domains. Our findings reveal that CoT methods significantly improve performance on easy and medium tasks but encounter challenges with hard tasks, where reasoning chains can confuse the model rather than improve accuracy. Additionally, we identify a positive correlation between reasoning path length and accuracy, demonstrating the potential of scaling inference for advanced instruction-following and reasoning. This study not only highlights the promise of CoT in enhancing LALM reasoning capabilities but also identifies key limitations and provides actionable directions for future research.