LAT-Audio is a large audio-language model designed for precise temporal awareness in long-form audio understanding.
Unlike existing models that degrade on long audio, LAT-Audio introduces a progressive global-to-local reasoning paradigm, enabling models to maintain temporal consistency over audio up to 30 minutes.
The core idea is to first construct a global timeline that captures the temporal-semantic structure of the audio, and then perform task-specific reasoning grounded on this timeline.
During reasoning, LAT-Audio iteratively incorporates audio evidence through a Think-With-Audio Chain-of-Thought (TWA-CoT) process, which significantly reduces:
temporal hallucination (invalid timestamps)
timestamp drift (progressive misalignment over time)
Model Description
LAT-Audio formulates long-form audio understanding as a structured reasoning process:
Global Timeline Construction
The model summarizes the audio into a coarse temporal structure.
Global-to-Local Reasoning
Downstream tasks are performed conditioned on the global timeline.
Think-With-Audio Chain-of-Thought (TWA-CoT)
The model iteratively retrieves local audio segments and refines its reasoning with grounded evidence.
This design enables robust temporal reasoning under long-context settings, where conventional direct modeling approaches often fail.
Figure 1: Overall framework of LAT-Audio.
Model Variants
We provide two model variants:
Model
Reasoning
Training Data
Description
LAT-Audio
Yes
LAT-Chronicle
Tool-augmented multi-step reasoning model with global-to-local temporal inference
LAT-Audio-Base
No
LAT-Chronicle + in-house
Direct modeling baseline fine-tuned from Qwen3-Omni with more in-house data, offering faster and simpler inference
1@article{shao2026lataudio,
2 title={Listening with Time: Precise Temporal Awareness for Long-Form Audio Understanding},
3 author={Shao, Mingchen and Su, Hang and Tian, Wenjie and Mu, Bingshen and Lin, Zhennan and Fan, Lichun and Luo, Zhenbo and Luan, Jian and Xie, Lei},
4 journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.22245},
5 year={2026}
6}
