arXiv:2603.14636v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has been extended to large audio-language models (LALMs) to elicit reasoning, yet enhancing its effectiveness without training remains challenging. We study inference-time model steering as a training-free approach to improve LALM reasoning. We introduce three strategies using diverse information sources and evaluate them across four LALMs and four benchmarks. Results show general accuracy gains up to 4.4% over CoT prompting. Notably, we identify a cross-modal transfer where steering vectors derived from few text samples effectively guide speech-based reasoning, demonstrating high data efficiency. We also examine hyperparameter sensitivity to understand the robustness of these approaches. Our findings position model steering as a practical direction for strengthening LALM reasoning.
Translating AI research into reality: summary of the 2025 voice AI Symposium and Hackathon
The 2025 Voice AI Symposium represented a transition from conceptual research to clinical implementation in vocal biomarker science. Hosted by the NIH-funded Bridge2AI-Voice consortium, the