zhang26f@interspeech_2026@ISCA

Total: 1

#1 CoRE: Contrastive Evidence-Aware Rescoring for Multiple-Choice Audio Question Answering [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Peihong Zhang, Zhixin Li, Yuxuan Liu, Yiqiang Cai, Yizhou Tan, Shengchen Li

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on multiple-choice Audio Question Answering (AQA) but often exhibit modality bias, over-relying on textual priors in questions and candidate options rather than grounded acoustic evidence. We present CoRE, a training-free, plug-and-play test-time option re-scoring method. CoRE constructs counterfactual audio via chunk permutation and random segment reversal to disrupt long-range temporal structure while largely preserving short-time acoustics. It estimates option-level evidence gain by contrasting scores from original and counterfactual audio, and applies an adaptive evidence-aware gate for final prediction. Under a unified option-scoring protocol, experiments on DCASE 2025 Task 5 and AIR-Bench SoundQA show consistent gains with Qwen2-Audio and Kimi-Audio.

Subject: INTERSPEECH.2026 - Language and Multimodal