mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Speech-Hands: A Self-Reflection Voice Agentic Approach to Speech Recognition and Audio Reasoning with Omni Perception

arXiv 2601.09413 ↗First posted 14 Jan 2026cs.SD cs.AI cs.CLcited by 2

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks

Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a voice-agentic framework that learns one critical omni-understanding skill: knowing when to trust itself versus when to consult external audio perception. Our work is motivated by a crucial yet counterintuitive finding: naively fine-tuning an omni-model on both speech recognition and external sound understanding tasks often degrades performance, as the model can be easily misled by noisy hypotheses. To address this, our framework, Speech-Hands, recasts the problem as an explicit self-reflection decision. This learnable reflection primitive proves effective in preventing the model from being derailed by flawed external candidates. We show that this agentic action mechanism generalizes naturally from speech recognition to complex, multiple-choice audio reasoning. Across the OpenASR leaderboard, Speech-Hands consistently outperforms strong baselines by 12.1% WER on seven benchmarks. The model also achieves 77.37% accuracy and high F1 on audio QA decisions, showing robust generalization and reliability across diverse audio question answering datasets. By unifying perception and decision-making, our work offers a practical path toward more reliable and resilient audio intelligence.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 22 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Jan 2026.

Builds on

22 of 41 references.

References · 22

  1. 2022Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervisioncited by 3,972
  2. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
  3. 2023MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Actioncited by 511
  4. 2025Phi-4-Mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAscited by 491
  5. 2021VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretationcited by 455
  6. 2021GigaSpeech: An Evolving, Multi-domain ASR Corpus with 10,000 Hours of Transcribed Audiocited by 391
  7. 2023Make-An-Audio: Text-To-Audio Generation with Prompt-Enhanced Diffusion Modelscited by 323
  8. 2024MMAU: A Massive Multi-Task Audio Understanding and Reasoning Benchmarkcited by 281
  9. 2024Mini-Omni: Language Models Can Hear, Talk While Thinking in Streamingcited by 204
  10. 2025MMAR: A Challenging Benchmark for Deep Reasoning in Speech, Audio, Music, and Their Mixcited by 113
  11. 2025Baichuan-Omni-1.5 Technical Reportcited by 107
  12. 2021SPGISpeech: 5,000 hours of transcribed financial audio for fully formatted end-to-end speech recognitioncited by 77
10 more
  1. 2023Generative Speech Recognition Error Correction with Large Language Models and Task-Activating Promptingcited by 71
  2. 2024Vision-Language Models Can Self-Improve Reasoning via Reflectioncited by 66
  3. 2025Canary-1B-v2 & Parakeet-TDT-0.6B-v3: Efficient and High-Performance Models for Multilingual ASR and ASTcited by 51
  4. 2025HumanOmniV2: From Understanding to Omni-Modal Reasoning with Contextcited by 50
  5. 2020Audio Captioning using Pre-Trained Large-Scale Language Model Guided by Audio-based Similar Caption Retrievalcited by 27
  6. 2019A multi-room reverberant dataset for sound event localization and detectioncited by 18
  7. 2024Audio-Agent: Leveraging LLMs For Audio Generation, Editing and Compositioncited by 8
  8. 2024NeKo: Cross-Modality Post-Recognition Error Correction with Tasks-Guided Mixture-of-Experts Language Modelcited by 7
  9. 2025Fewer Hallucinations, More Verification: A Three-Stage LLM-Based Framework for ASR Error Correctioncited by 7
  10. 2024Overview of the L3DAS23 Challenge on Audio-Visual Extended Realitycited by 4

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026SpeechGym: An Audio-Native Gym for Training Voice Agents via Reinforcement Learning
  2. 2026Agentic Active Omni-Modal Perception for Multi-Hop Audio-Visual Reasoning
  3. 2025VoiceAssistant-Eval: Benchmarking AI Assistants across Listening, Speaking, and Viewing
  4. 2025Thinking While Speaking: Inference-Time Knowledge Transfer for Responsive and Intelligent Conversational Voice Agents
  5. 2025AMUSE: Audio-Visual Benchmark and Alignment Framework for Agentic Multi-Speaker Understanding
  6. 2026HEAR Who Said What: Unlocking Speaker-Attributed Reasoning via Counterfactual Voice Grounding
  7. 2025Active Perception Agent for Omnimodal Audio-Video Understanding
  8. 2026Omni-o3: Deep Nested Omnimodal Deduction for Deliberative Audio-Visual Reasoning