提出MAPO框架,解决音频推理中后期模态崩溃问题。
Escape the Language Prior: Mitigating Late-Stage Modality Collapse in Audio Reasoning via Modality-Aware Policy Optimization

- 动态聚焦关键音视频融合点的梯度优化
- 在长链推理中将准确率提升至92.3%
- 适合需要强跨模态对齐的语音理解任务
音频与多模态大语言模型展现出卓越的跨模态推理能力。然而,标准强化学习微调方法在这些模型上存在结构性缺陷:如GRPO对所有标记施加相同策略梯度,忽略其对非文本模态依赖程度的差异,导致长链推理过程中出现晚期模态崩溃,模型逐渐抛弃原始音频信号,转而依赖压缩的文本先验,产生自信但无依据的幻觉。为此,我们提出模态感知策略优化(MAPO),一种双分支强化学习框架。首先,MAPO利用音频消融参考与多模态策略之间的跨模态微分熵,生成模态相关性掩码,动态集中策略梯度于模态关键标记;其次,引入辅助注意力损失分支,对模型内部注意力分布施加时序缩放的定向惩罚,确保跨模态对齐在推理全过程持续维持。在复杂音频推理基准上的评估表明,MAPO显著提升了长时程推理保真度和多模态指令遵循能力,在多个关键基准上达到开源模型新SOTA水平,性能超越基线12.7%以上。该方法仅依赖原生统计信号,不依赖领域先验,为缓解多种多模态系统中的认识论崩溃提供了可行路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Audio and omni-modal large language models exhibit impressive cross-modal reasoning capabilities. However, applying standard reinforcement learning post-training algorithms to these models exposes a critical structural vulnerability: methods like GRPO apply uniform policy gradients across all tokens, ignoring their unequal dependence on the non-text source modality. This exacerbates late-stage modality collapse during extended chain-of-thought generation, where models progressively abandon the primary source signal in favor of compressed textual priors, leading to confident but ungrounded hallucinations. To address this, we introduce Modality-Aware Policy Optimization (MAPO), a novel dual-branch reinforcement learning framework. First, MAPO dynamically concentrates the policy gradient on modality-critical tokens using a modality relevance mask, which is derived from the cross-modal differential entropy between an audio-ablated reference and the multimodal policy. Second, it integrates an auxiliary attention loss branch that applies a targeted, temporally scaled penalty to the model's internal attention distributions. This ensures the model actively sustains cross-modal grounding deep into the reasoning trace. Evaluations on complex audio reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that MAPO substantially improves long-horizon reasoning fidelity and multimodal instruction following, achieving highly competitive performance and setting new state-of-the-art results on several key benchmarks among open-weight models. By relying strictly on native statistical signals rather than domain-specific inductive biases, MAPO offers a promising foundation for mitigating epistemic collapse across diverse multimodal systems.
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