Jihoon Jeong

PhD - Université Laval

Supervisor

Cem Subakan

Co-supervisor

Mirco Ravanelli

Research Topics

Deep Learning

Multimodal Learning

Signal Processing

Website

Google Scholar

Publications

Listen First, Then Answer: Timestamp-Grounded Speech Reasoning

Large audio-language models (LALMs) can generate reasoning chains for their predictions, but it remains unclear whether these reasoning chai… (see more)ns remain grounded in the input audio. In this paper, we propose an RL-based strategy that grounds the reasoning outputs of LALMs with explicit timestamp annotations referring to relevant segments of the audio signal. Our analysis shows that timestamp grounding leads the model to attend more strongly to audio tokens during reasoning generation. Experiments on four speech-based benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach improves performance compared to both zero-shot reasoning and fine-tuning without timestamp grounding. Additionally, grounding amplifies desirable reasoning behaviors, such as region exploration, audiology verification, and consistency, underscoring the importance of grounding mechanisms for faithful multimodal reasoning.

2026-03-18

arXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Knowing When to Answer: Adaptive Confidence Refinement for Reliable Audio-Visual Question Answering

Dinh Phu Tran

Jihoon Jeong

Saad Wazir

Seongah Kim

Thao Do

Cem Subakan

Daeyoung Kim