Focus-Then-Listen

Focus Then Listen: An Empirical Study of Plug-and-Play Audio Enhancer for Noise-Robust Large Audio Language Models

arXiv:2603.04862v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large audio language models (LALMs) are a class of foundation models for audio understanding. Existing LALMs tend to degrade significantly in real-world noisy acoustic conditions where speech and non-speech sounds interfere. While noise-aware fine-tuning can improve robustness, it requires task-specific noisy data and expensive retraining, limiting scalability.