Beyond Semantic Dominance: Cognitive Affective Reasoning and Empathetic Response Alignment in Audio Language Models

While Audio Language Models (ALMs) demonstrate strong semantic understanding, they struggle with complex affective interactions. Specifically, textual semantic dominance often overshadows acoustic nuances, and a lack of cognitive depth leads to generic, emotion-agnostic responses. We propose CogAudio-LLMfootnote urlstylesame https://github.com/zxzhao0/CogAudio-LLM, a novel cognitive affective reasoning framework. To mitigate semantic dominance, we build LIME-440K, a ``lexically-identical, multi-emotion'' dataset designed to facilitate acoustic-semantic decoupling. We introduce EIPS, a 4-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mechanism incorporating psychological reasoning. For inference efficiency, multi-stage training explicitly establishes EIPS via supervised fine-tuning, then distills this logic into an implicit generation process. Finally, we design DR-SAPO (Dual-Route Soft Adaptive Policy Optimization) to dynamically balance the logical rigor of the CoT with the empathetic quality of the direct response.