{"paper":{"title":"Learning When to Think While Listening in Large Audio-Language Models","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI","cs.LG","cs.SD"],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Cheng Zhu, Jiatao Gu, Suhao Yu, Weici Zhao, Yang Xiao, Zhiyuan Song","submitted_at":"2026-05-26T15:43:11Z","abstract_excerpt":"Recent advances in Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have made real-time, streaming spoken interaction increasingly practical. In this setting, reasoning quality and responsiveness are tightly coupled: delaying reasoning until the speech endpoint can improve answer quality but moves deliberation into user-visible response delay, while answering too early risks committing before decisive evidence arrives. We introduce a learnable wait-think-answer control formulation for LALMs. Motivated by the incremental nature of human conversation, the controller decides under partial audio evidence when "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2605.27190","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2605.27190/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}