arXiv · 2610.16217
RefTAG: Reflection-aware Temporal Audio Grounding in Large Audio Language Models
Abstract
Temporal audio grounding requires locating every occurrence of a queried target, making both occurrence counts and interval boundaries essential. We propose RefTAG, a post-training framework for verifiable temporal self-correction. Its Reflection Chain-of-Thought (Re-CoT) protocol combines draft intervals, discrete count and boundary actions, and revised intervals in one response. Supervised fine-tuning on these trajectories (Re-CoT-SFT) teaches the protocol; reinforcement learning (RL) jointly rewards final localization and revision outcomes. Across 8,228 queries, Re-CoT-SFT improves query-weighted mIoU over final-answer SFT by 1.74 percentage points. RL further improves TAG-Bench multi-target mIoU by 0.40 points and R@0.5 by 0.86 points. The final model achieves 38.50% TAG-Bench mIoU and 51.01% mean mIoU across three datasets, outperforming the evaluated open-source MOSS-Audio and FireRedAudio models and the commercial Gemini-3.1-Pro on both measures. These results demonstrate that explicitly coupling count- and boundary-aware revision with joint reward optimization provides an effective and verifiable path to temporal audio grounding.
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Yuhang Dai, Xin Shu, Zhennan Lin, Mingchen Shao, Chengyou Wang, Xiangang Li, Jianwei Yu, Lei Xie. 2026-10-12. RefTAG: Reflection-aware Temporal Audio Grounding in Large Audio Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16217
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