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Auteurs principaux: Sheng, Zhichao, Zhou, Shilin, Gong, Chen, Li, Zhenghua
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21960
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author Sheng, Zhichao
Zhou, Shilin
Gong, Chen
Li, Zhenghua
author_facet Sheng, Zhichao
Zhou, Shilin
Gong, Chen
Li, Zhenghua
contents Large Audio Language Models (LALMs), powered by the chain-of-thought (CoT) paradigm, have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities. Intuitively, different problems often require varying depths of reasoning. While some methods can determine whether to reason for a given problem, they typically lack a fine-grained mechanism to modulate how much to reason. This often results in a ``one-size-fits-all'' reasoning depth, which generates redundant overthinking for simple questions while failing to allocate sufficient thought to complex ones. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of LALMs and find that an effective and efficient LALM should reason smartly by adapting its reasoning depth to the problem's complexity. To achieve this, we propose a difficulty-adaptive reasoning method for LALMs. Specifically, we propose a reward function that dynamically links reasoning length to the model's perceived problem difficulty. This reward encourages shorter, concise reasoning for easy tasks and more elaborate, in-depth reasoning for complex ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is both effective and efficient, simultaneously improving task performance and significantly reducing the average reasoning length. Further analysis on reasoning structure paradigm offers valuable insights for future work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_21960
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Think Smart, Not Hard: Difficulty Adaptive Reasoning for Large Audio Language Models
Sheng, Zhichao
Zhou, Shilin
Gong, Chen
Li, Zhenghua
Machine Learning
Large Audio Language Models (LALMs), powered by the chain-of-thought (CoT) paradigm, have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities. Intuitively, different problems often require varying depths of reasoning. While some methods can determine whether to reason for a given problem, they typically lack a fine-grained mechanism to modulate how much to reason. This often results in a ``one-size-fits-all'' reasoning depth, which generates redundant overthinking for simple questions while failing to allocate sufficient thought to complex ones. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of LALMs and find that an effective and efficient LALM should reason smartly by adapting its reasoning depth to the problem's complexity. To achieve this, we propose a difficulty-adaptive reasoning method for LALMs. Specifically, we propose a reward function that dynamically links reasoning length to the model's perceived problem difficulty. This reward encourages shorter, concise reasoning for easy tasks and more elaborate, in-depth reasoning for complex ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is both effective and efficient, simultaneously improving task performance and significantly reducing the average reasoning length. Further analysis on reasoning structure paradigm offers valuable insights for future work.
title Think Smart, Not Hard: Difficulty Adaptive Reasoning for Large Audio Language Models
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21960