# SoundMind: RL-Incentivized Logic Reasoning for Audio-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12935 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12935/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio-language model reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 25 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12599/) (2025)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [Qwen2-Audio Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10759/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10440/) (2024)
- [Logic-RL: Unleashing LLM Reasoning with Rule-Based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14768/) (2025)
- [REINFORCE++: Stabilizing Critic-Free Policy Optimization with Global Advantage Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03262/) (2025)
- [Marco-o1: Towards Open Reasoning Models for Open-Ended Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14405/) (2024)
- [Audio Flamingo 2: An Audio-Language Model with Long-Audio Understanding and Expert Reasoning Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03983/) (2025)
- [MAmmoTH-VL: Eliciting Multimodal Reasoning with Instruction Tuning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05237/) (2024)
- [Spark-TTS: An Efficient LLM-Based Text-to-Speech Model with Single-Stream Decoupled Speech Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01710/) (2025)
- [Baichuan-Omni-1.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15368/) (2025)
- [Audio-Reasoner: Improving Reasoning Capability in Large Audio Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02318/) (2025)
- [Audio-CoT: Exploring Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Audio Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07246/) (2025)
- [MegaTTS 3: Sparse Alignment Enhanced Latent Diffusion Transformer for Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18924/) (2025)
- [InfiMM-WebMath-40B: Advancing Multimodal Pre-Training for Enhanced Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12568/) (2024)
- [Making More of Little Data: Improving Low-Resource Automatic Speech Recognition Using Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10951/) (2023)
- [Leveraging unsupervised and weakly-supervised data to improve direct speech-to-speech translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13339/) (2022)
- [Learning Musical Representations for Music Performance Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06710/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Guided by Evolutionary Algorithms in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05376/) (2024)
- [Text-To-Speech Data Augmentation for Low Resource Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00291/) (2022)
- [Music Audio-Visual Question Answering Requires Specialized Multimodal Designs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20638/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02547/) (2025)
- [CodeV: Code with Images for Faithful Visual Reasoning via Tool-Aware Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19661/) (2025)
- [UALM: Unified Audio Language Model for Understanding, Generation and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12000/) (2025)
- [FakeSV-VLM: Taming VLM for Detecting Fake Short-Video News via Progressive Mixture-Of-Experts Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19639/) (2025)
- [Audio Flamingo Sound-CoT Technical Report: Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Sound Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11818/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Speech Large Language Models through Reinforced Behavior Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03526/) (2025)
- [Rebellion: Noise-Robust Reasoning Training for Audio Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09682/) (2025)
- [Q-Hawkeye: Reliable Visual Policy Optimization for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22920/) (2026)
- [PARSA-Bench: A Comprehensive Persian Audio-Language Model Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14456/) (2026)
- [Multi-Modal Machine Learning Framework for Predicting Early Recurrence of Brain Tumors Using MRI and Clinical Biomarkers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01161/) (2025)
- [A Multimodal Deep Learning Framework for Early Diagnosis of Liver Cancer via Optimized BiLSTM-AM-VMD Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01164/) (2025)
- [DiffuSpeech: Silent Thought, Spoken Answer via Unified Speech-Text Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22889/) (2026)
- [Disentangling Reasoning in Large Audio-Language Models for Ambiguous Emotion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08230/) (2026)
- [SpectCount: Spectrotemporal Counting via Synthetic Signals Improves Large Audio Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06907/) (2026)
- [What Does LALM Post-training Learn? Rethinking Audio Understanding and Reasoning Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19476/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While large language models have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities, their extension to the audio modality, particularly within large audio-language models (LALMs), remains underexplored. Addressing this gap requires a systematic approach that involves a capable base model, high-quality reasoning-oriented audio data, and effective training algorithms. In this work, we present a comprehensive solution for audio logical reasoning (ALR) tasks: we introduce SoundMind, a dataset of 6,446 audio-text annotated samples specifically curated to support complex reasoning. Building on this resource, we propose SoundMind-RL, a rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm designed to equip audio-language models with robust audio-text reasoning capabilities. By fine-tuning Qwen2.5-Omni-7B on the proposed SoundMind dataset using SoundMind-RL, we achieve strong and consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines on the SoundMind benchmark. This work highlights the benefit of combining high-quality, reasoning-focused datasets with specialized RL techniques, and contributes to advancing auditory intelligence in language models. The code and dataset introduced in this work are publicly available at https://github.com/xid32/SoundMind.