mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Multi-Source Evidence Fusion for Audio Question Answering

arXiv 2603.17822 ↗First posted 18 Mar 2026eess.AS cs.CLcited by 0

On the map: LLM reasoning → Audio-language model reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Large audio language models (LALMs) can answer questions about speech, music, and environmental sounds, yet their internal reasoning is largely opaque and difficult to validate. We describe TalTech's solution to the Agent Track of the Interspeech 2026 Audio Reasoning Challenge, in which systems are evaluated on reasoning process quality, specifically the factual accuracy, logical soundness, and completeness of their reasoning chains. Our multi-source ensemble pipeline uses two LALMs that generate independent observations, while a separate text-only reasoning model cross-checks these against outputs from 25 acoustic tools organized into reliability tiers. By grounding every inference step in explicit, reliability-tagged evidence, the system produces dense, verifiable reasoning chains. Our system ranked first in the challenge, outperforming all competing systems by a wide margin in challenge's reasoning quality metric.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Audio-language model reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 30 of its 38 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2026.

Builds on

30 of 38 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026The Interspeech 2026 Audio Reasoning Challenge: Evaluating Reasoning Process Quality for Audio Reasoning Models and Agents15 Feb
  2. 2025Step-Audio-R1 Technical Report19 Nov
  3. 2025MMAR: A Challenging Benchmark for Deep Reasoning in Speech, Audio, Music, and Their Mix19 May

Other references · 27

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,072
  3. 2022Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervisioncited by 3,972
  4. 2023Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debatecited by 1,739
  5. 2023Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Promptingcited by 1,081
  6. 2023Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Modelscited by 988
  7. 2020ECAPA-TDNN: Emphasized Channel Attention, Propagation and Aggregation in TDNN Based Speaker Verificationcited by 606
  8. 2023Qwen-Audio: Advancing Universal Audio Understanding via Unified Large-Scale Audio-Language Modelscited by 591
  9. 2019PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognitioncited by 563
  10. 2024Qwen2-Audio Technical Reportcited by 543
  11. 2025Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligencecited by 523
  12. 2023SALMONN: Towards Generic Hearing Abilities for Large Language Modelscited by 492
15 more
  1. 2025Qwen3-Omni Technical Reportcited by 451
  2. 2024Mixture-of-Agents Enhances Large Language Model Capabilitiescited by 420
  3. 2021SpeechBrain: A General-Purpose Speech Toolkitcited by 404
  4. 2023AudioGPT: Understanding and Generating Speech, Music, Sound, and Talking Headcited by 264
  5. 2023Listen, Think, and Understandcited by 206
  6. 2024Audio Flamingo: A Novel Audio Language Model with Few-Shot Learning and Dialogue Abilitiescited by 183
  7. 2021AASIST: Audio Anti-Spoofing using Integrated Spectro-Temporal Graph Attention Networkscited by 173
  8. 2022Hybrid Transformers for Music Source Separationcited by 134
  9. 2018CREPE: A Convolutional Representation for Pitch Estimationcited by 109
  10. 2025Omni-R1: Do You Really Need Audio to Fine-Tune Your Audio LLM?cited by 42
  11. 2024Understanding Sounds, Missing the Questions: The Challenge of Object Hallucination in Large Audio-Language Modelscited by 30
  12. 2024Tools Fail: Detecting Silent Errors in Faulty Toolscited by 23
  13. 2024Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Estimation of Source Reliabilitycited by 19
  14. 2025AudioGenie-Reasoner: A Training-Free Multi-Agent Framework for Coarse-to-Fine Audio Deep Reasoningcited by 6
  15. 2025AudioToolAgent: An Agentic Framework for Audio-Language Modelscited by 6

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  1. 2026AudioRAG: A Challenging Benchmark for Audio Reasoning and Information Retrieval
  2. 2025Think Smart, Not Hard: Difficulty Adaptive Reasoning for Large Audio Language Models
  3. 2025Thinking with Sound: Audio Chain-of-Thought Enables Multimodal Reasoning in Large Audio-Language Models
  4. 2025Multi-Domain Audio Question Answering Benchmark Toward Acoustic Content Reasoning
  5. 2026EChO-Agent: Evidence Chain Orchestration Agent for Audio Reasoning
  6. 2025SAKURA: On the Multi-hop Reasoning of Large Audio-Language Models Based on Speech and Audio Information
  7. 2026AdaLoop: Adaptive-Depth Latent Reasoning for Audio Language Models
  8. 2026Enhancing Audio Reasoning via Semantic Summary Prediction