SWEAR: Section-Wise Efficient Audio Reasoning via Self-Rated Difficulty
arXiv:2610.13081v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work on large audio-language models (LALMs) explores adaptive reasoning to balance accuracy and efficiency. However, existing approaches often rely on coarse-grained difficulty estimation, overlooking the diverse factors that determine reasoning effort. We address this limitation by deriving five-dimensional difficulty scores and compressed reasoning traces from complementary offline assessments. Based on this characterization, we propose S…