Are Audio-Language Models Listening? Audio-Specialist Heads for Adaptive Audio Steering
Multimodal large language models can exhibit text dominance, over-relying on linguistic priors instead of grounding predictions in non-text inputs. One example is large audio-language models (LALMs) where decisive audio evidence can be under-utilized even when it contains important information. To address this issue we use mechanistic interpretability to identify a small set of audio-specialist attention heads whose audio attention yields a ``listening'' signal. We show that this signal increases when audio evidence affects the model's output, providing an indicator of audio engagement under standard prompting. Leveraging this localization, we construct an audio--silence steering directio...
| Authors | Neta Glazer, Lenny Aharon, Ethan Fetaya |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 6 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 March 2026 |
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