mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Omni-R1: Do You Really Need Audio to Fine-Tune Your Audio LLM?

arXiv 2505.09439 ↗First posted 14 May 2025eess.AS cs.SDcited by 42

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Cited by 21 in LLM reasoning, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

We propose Omni-R1 which fine-tunes a recent multi-modal LLM, Qwen2.5-Omni, on an audio question answering dataset with the reinforcement learning method GRPO. This leads to new State-of-the-Art performance on the recent MMAU and MMAR benchmarks. Omni-R1 achieves the highest accuracies on the sounds, music, speech, and overall average categories, both on the Test-mini and Test-full splits. To understand the performance improvement, we tested models both with and without audio and found that much of the performance improvement from GRPO could be attributed to better text-based reasoning. We also made a surprising discovery that fine-tuning without audio on a text-only dataset was effective at improving the audio-based performance.

Key facts. Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 14 May 2025.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 16; 2026: 26.

42 papers.

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  1. 2025Step-Audio 2 Technical Reportcited by 101
  2. 2025Audio-Thinker: Guiding Audio Language Model When and How to Think via Reinforcement Learningcited by 19
  3. 2026Audio Flamingo Next: Next-Generation Open Audio-Language Models for Speech, Sound, and Musiccited by 15
  4. 2025UALM: Unified Audio Language Model for Understanding, Generation and Reasoningcited by 10
  5. 2025Exploring Fine-Tuning of Large Audio Language Models for Spoken Language Understanding under Limited Speech Datacited by 6
  6. 2025Understanding the Mixture-of-Experts with Nadaraya-Watson Kernelcited by 6
  7. 2026The Interspeech 2026 Audio Reasoning Challenge: Evaluating Reasoning Process Quality for Audio Reasoning Models and Agentscited by 6
  8. 2025Pay More Attention To Audio: Mitigating Imbalance of Cross-Modal Attention in Large Audio Language Modelscited by 5
  9. 2025Advancing Speech Understanding in Speech-Aware Language Models with GRPOcited by 4
  10. 2025Towards Audio Token Compression in Large Audio Language Modelscited by 4
  11. 2025Omni-AutoThink: Adaptive Multimodal Reasoning via Reinforcement Learningcited by 4
  12. 2026ThinkOmni: Lifting Textual Reasoning to Omni-modal Scenarios via Guidance Decodingcited by 4
30 more
  1. 2025LLaSO: A Foundational Framework for Reproducible Research in Large Language and Speech Modelcited by 3
  2. 2026Echo: Towards Advanced Audio Comprehension via Audio-Interleaved Reasoningcited by 3
  3. 2026ReRec: Reasoning-Augmented LLM-based Recommendation Assistant via Reinforcement Fine-tuningcited by 3
  4. 2026Learning When to Think While Listening in Large Audio-Language Modelscited by 2
  5. 2026Escape the Language Prior: Mitigating Late-Stage Modality Collapse in Audio Reasoning via Modality-Aware Policy Optimizationcited by 2
  6. 2026A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Modelscited by 2
  7. 2025Omni-CLST: Error-aware Curriculum Learning with guided Selective chain-of-Thought for audio question answeringcited by 1
  8. 2025SightSound-R1: Cross-Modal Reasoning Distillation from Vision to Audio Language Modelscited by 1
  9. 2025Long Grounded Thoughts: Synthesizing Visual Problems and Reasoning Chains at Scalecited by 1
  10. 2025Rebellion: Noise-Robust Reasoning Training for Audio Reasoning Modelscited by 1
  11. 2026Words at Play: Benchmarking Audio Pun Understanding in Large Audio-Language Modelscited by 1
  12. 2026Audio-DeepThinker: Progressive Reasoning-Aware Reinforcement Learning for High-Quality Chain-of-Thought Emergence in Audio Language Modelscited by 1
  13. 2026Reinforcement Learning with Evolving Rubrics as Rewards for Audio Reasoningcited by 1
  14. 2026SpeechGym: An Audio-Native Gym for Training Voice Agents via Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
  15. 2025Beyond Modality Limitations: A Unified MLLM Approach to Automated Speaking Assessment with Effective Curriculum Learningcited by 0
  16. 2025Think Smart, Not Hard: Difficulty Adaptive Reasoning for Large Audio Language Modelscited by 0
  17. 2026DriveCode: Domain Specific Numerical Encoding for LLM-Based Autonomous Drivingcited by 0
  18. 2026When Scaling Fails: Mitigating Audio Perception Decay of LALMs via Multi-Step Perception-Aware Reasoningcited by 0
  19. 2026Multi-Source Evidence Fusion for Audio Question Answeringcited by 0
  20. 2026Omni-Persona: Systematic Benchmarking and Improving Omnimodal Personalizationcited by 0
  21. 2026RAIL: Rethinking Auditory Intelligence in Large Audio-Language Models with a CHC-Grounded Benchmarkcited by 0
  22. 2026AudioDER: A Deduplication-Enhanced Reasoning Dataset for Post-Training Large Audio-Language Modelscited by 0
  23. 2026Reinforcement Learning for Data-Efficient Code-Switched ASRcited by 0
  24. 2026Robust Summarization of Doctor-Patient Conversations: TalTech Systems for the Beyond Transcription Challengecited by 0
  25. 2026ToolDF: Tool-Integrated Reasoning for Mixed-Authenticity Audio Deepfake Detectioncited by 0
  26. 2026TAD: Token-Adaptive Contrastive Decoding with Confidence-Guided Gating for Hallucination Mitigation in Large Audio-Language Modelscited by 0
  27. 2026EvoAudio: Recursive Self-Improvement for Audio Understandingcited by 0
  28. 2026Mizar: A 159M-Parameter Audio-Language Model for Audio Understandingcited by 0
  29. 2026Do Audio LLMs Listen Before They Act? Diagnosing Acoustic-Context Gating in Voice Agentscited by 0
  30. 2026Seeing What Should Be Heard: Diagnosing and Repairing Cross-Modal Shortcuts in Omni-Modal LLMscited by 0