ResearchResearch paperSpeech & Audio1 source · Oct 9, 2026

SWEAR: Section-Wise Efficient Audio Reasoning via Self-Rated Difficulty

Based on this characterization, we propose SWEAR, a difficulty-aware reasoning framework that learns difficulty signals during supervised fine-tuning and uses reinforcement learning to adapt reasoning allocation across reasoning stages.

Key points

  • Recent work on large audio-language models (LALMs) explores adaptive reasoning to balance accuracy and efficiency.
  • However, existing approaches often rely on coarse-grained difficulty estimation, overlooking the diverse factors that determine reasoning effort.
  • We address this limitation by deriving five-dimensional difficulty scores and compressed reasoning traces from complementary offline assessments.
  • Experiments on MMAU-test-mini and MMAR show that SWEAR improves accuracy while substantially reducing generated tokens, shortening reasoning for easy instances without sacrificing performance on difficult ones.

Sources (1)

  • [1]SWEAR: Section-Wise Efficient Audio Reasoning via Self-Rated Difficulty
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 9, 06:36 AM
    Based on this characterization, we propose SWEAR, a difficulty-aware reasoning framework that learns difficulty signals during supervised fine-tuning and uses reinforcement learning to adapt reasoning allocation across reasoning stages.
    Recent work on large audio-language models (LALMs) explores adaptive reasoning to balance accuracy and efficiency.

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