On Temporal Binding in Large Audio Language Models
Reasoning about temporal structure of audio recordings requires Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) to associate sound events with their temporal position. Understanding the underlying mechanisms is a first step toward diagnosing failures and identifying model components that may need improvement. Using mechanistic interpretability, we investigate how temporal information is represented and bound to sound events in three open-source LALMs. We find that across all three, event-specific location becomes concentrated in event name representations at intermediate modality integration layers. These representations encode coarse event position along a low-dimensional, curved relative time traje...
| Authors | Paul Primus, Gerhard Widmer |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SD |
| Published | 28 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 September 2026 |
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