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Towards Spoken Mathematical Reasoning: Benchmarking Speech-based Models over Multi-faceted Math Problems

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arxiv 2505.15000 v1 pith:RVMPW6ZQ submitted 2025-05-21 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords reasoningllmsmathematicalspeechmodelsproblemsspokenarithmetic
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have led to strong reasoning ability across a wide range of tasks. However, their ability to perform mathematical reasoning from spoken input remains underexplored. Prior studies on speech modality have mostly focused on factual speech understanding or simple audio reasoning tasks, providing limited insight into logical step-by-step reasoning, such as that required for mathematical problem solving. To address this gap, we introduce Spoken Math Question Answering (Spoken-MQA), a new benchmark designed to evaluate the mathematical reasoning capabilities of speech-based models, including both cascade models (ASR + LLMs) and end-to-end speech LLMs. Spoken-MQA covers a diverse set of math problems, including pure arithmetic, single-step and multi-step contextual reasoning, and knowledge-oriented reasoning problems, all presented in unambiguous natural spoken language. Through extensive experiments, we find that: (1) while some speech LLMs perform competitively on contextual reasoning tasks involving basic arithmetic, they still struggle with direct arithmetic problems; (2) current LLMs exhibit a strong bias toward symbolic mathematical expressions written in LaTex and have difficulty interpreting verbalized mathematical expressions; and (3) mathematical knowledge reasoning abilities are significantly degraded in current speech LLMs.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Efficient Chain-of-Modality Reasoning via Progressive Compression for Spoken Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Spoken math models that emit a 40%-compressed reasoning trace between question and answer beat full-reasoning baselines by ~3 accuracy points while using roughly one third of the text tokens.

  2. Mind-Paced Speaking: A Dual-Brain Approach to Real-Time Reasoning in Spoken Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    MPS proposes a dual-brain architecture separating formulation reasoning from articulation to achieve real-time CoT in SLMs with accuracy comparable to full pre-computation but much lower latency.

  3. Step-Audio-R1.5 Technical Report

    eess.AS 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    Step-Audio-R1.5 applies RLHF to audio reasoning models to maintain analytical performance while improving prosodic naturalness and immersion in extended spoken interactions.

  4. Step-Audio-R1.5 Technical Report

    eess.AS 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    Step-Audio-R1.5 applies RLHF to audio reasoning models to escape the verifiable reward trap of RLVR, preserving analytical ability while restoring prosodic naturalness and immersion in long dialogues.

  5. A Survey of Audio Reasoning in Multimodal Foundation Models

    eess.AS 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 2.0 of 10

    A survey that provides a unified formulation of audio reasoning and reviews advances across Audio-to-Text, Audio-to-Speech, Audio-Visual, and Agentic paradigms while discussing challenges and future directions.

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