# Listen, See and Track: Spatio-Temporal Audio-Visual Sound Event Reasoning for Omni-Modal Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09435 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09435/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio-language model reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 13 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [Qwen2-Audio Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10759/) (2024)
- [Kimi-Audio Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18425/) (2025)
- [OWL: Geometry-Aware Spatial Reasoning for Audio Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26140/) (2025)
- [SPUR: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Integrating Spatial Audio Understanding and Reasoning into Large Audio-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06606/) (2025)
- [Spatial-Omni: Spatial Audio Understanding Integration in Multimodal LLMs via FOA Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10738/) (2026)
- [Spatial Audio Motion Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14666/) (2025)
- [Spatio-Temporal Audio Language Modeling for Dynamic Sound Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14141/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [AVTrace: Diagnosing Audio-Visual Temporal Reasoning in Omni Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19991/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding dynamic sound sources requires jointly determining what produces a sound, where the source is located, and how it moves over time. Yet existing audio-language models often represent clips as global acoustic events, while vision-language models lack the spatial audio cues needed to localize and track individual sources. To evaluate this missing capability, we introduce ST-OmniQA, a spatio-temporal audio-visual question-answering benchmark built from panoramic videos paired with synchronized first-order Ambisonics (FOA) audio of moving sound sources. It contains 40K videos and 400K question-answer pairs organized into four capability levels covering sound-event recognition, direction of arrival, source distance, motion trajectories, and temporally grounded audio-visual reasoning. Building on this benchmark, we propose ST-Omni-R1, which integrates FOA-derived semantic and trajectory representations with panoramic visual context and is trained through progressive curriculum learning and reasoning-tree reinforcement learning. ST-Omni-R1 achieves 77.83% average semantic accuracy across the four levels, compared with 37.28% for the best evaluated baseline. Results on three public spatial-audio benchmarks further indicate that its learned spatial and motion representations transfer beyond ST-OmniQA.