Steering Where to Listen: Instruction-Based Activation Steering Redirects Temporal Attention in Large Audio-Language Models
Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel at audio understanding but expose little about where in an audio signal they attend. We introduce instruction-based vector steering, which constructs a steering vector by contrasting activations from differently instructed prompts while keeping the audio fixed. Through a systematic probe of LALM attention, we find that - unlike standard prompting or audio-based steering - this intervention significantly redistributes the temporal attention allocated to audio tokens, concentrating it on acoustically relevant regions. We then show that this attention shift is behaviorally meaningful: in a controlled three-event setting, reading out the temporal posi...
| Authors | Tsung-En Lin, Hung-Yi Lee |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 9 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 June 2026 |
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