Hear, Localize, and Reason: Spatially Aware Scene Understanding for Audio-Visual LLMs
Organizations: POSTECH · KAIST · Hankuk University of Foreign Studies · The University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
Audio-visual large language models (AV-LLMs) have made strong progress in multimodal understanding, yet most treat audio as monaural semantic content, limiting their ability to reason about where sounds originate and how they relate to the visual scene. Recent spatial audio-visual studies address parts of this problem, but often focus on specific abilities, such as spatial correspondence or direction and distance reasoning. In this work, we introduce HLR-AVSceneQA, a comprehensive benchmark with a hear-localize-reason hierarchy that evaluates whether models can recognize what is heard, localize sound sources in egocentric and allocentric views, and use these localized sources to reason about how they relate to the visual scene. We further introduce HLR-LLM, which augments a strong audio-visual foundation model with a binaural spatial audio branch alongside its monaural semantic audio pathway. We train HLR-LLM with a curriculum that incorporates final-stage chain-of-thought supervision for multi-step spatial reasoning. Experiments show that existing AV-LLMs remain limited in spatial grounding and relational reasoning, while HLR-LLM substantially improves spatial audio-visual scene understanding without compromising semantic audio-visual perception.
Figures & tables
| Benchmark | A+V | Multi- source | Far-field ASR | Sound event | Ego. | Allo. | AV Corr. | Cross- room | Hidden Source | Proximity | AV Caption |
| BAT Zheng et al. (2024) | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| SpatialWhisper Tang et al. (2024) | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Hear You Are Ryu et al. (2026) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| SAVVY-Bench Chen et al. (2025) | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| SpatialSceneQA Liu et al. (2026) | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| HLR-AVSceneQA | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Task family | Subtask | Representative example |
| Spatial hearing | Sound event | Q : What sound do you hear? A : Hair dryer drying . |
| Far-field ASR | Q : Write the exact phrase spoken. A : ‘‘Yes it is suppressed’’ . | |
| Egocentric grounding | Direction | Q : From the current viewpoint, which direction is the sound coming from? A : front-left . |
| Distance | Q : From the current viewpoint, how far is the sound source? A : 2.5--3 m . | |
| Allocentric grounding | Direction | Q : If you stand at the sofa and face the TV, which direction is the sound coming from? A : back-left . |
| Distance | Q : If you stand at the sofa and face the TV, how far is the sound source? A : 0--1.0 m . |
| Model | Modality | Spatial Hearing | Egocentric Grounding | Allocentric Grounding | |||
| Sound (Acc. %) | Speech (WER ) | Direction | Distance | Direction | Distance | ||
| Random chance | 10.00 | - | 12.50 | 10.00 | 12.50 | 10.00 | |
| Zero-shot models | |||||||
| MiniCPM-o-v2.6 Yao et al. (2024) | V + M | 35.26 0.32 | 126.10 5.51 | 12.83 0.48 | 14.26 0.66 | 11.92 0.36 | 18.42 0.51 |
| VideoLLaMA2 Cheng et al. (2024) | V + M | 54.54 0.11 | 113.54 0.82 | 12.15 0.41 | 7.73 0.05 | 15.84 0.36 | 7.19 0.17 |
| Video-SALMONN 2 Tang et al. (2025) | V + M | 32.20 0.13 | 0.02 | 17.00 0.22 | 7.62 0.07 | 17.55 0.20 | 6.98 0.12 |
| Model | Modality | Spatial Relational Reasoning (Acc. %) | Scene Captioning | ||||||
| Visibility | Correspondence | Hidden source | Loudness | Proximity | CIDEr-D | METEOR | SPIDEr | ||
| Random chance | 50.00 | 9.49 | 20.00 | 50.00 | 28.68 | - | - | - | |
| Zero-shot models | |||||||||
| MiniCPM-o-v2.6 Yao et al. (2024) | V + M | 75.20 0.14 | 22.52 1.09 | 11.65 0.62 | 47.29 0.48 | 26.83 0.62 | 0.078 0.004 | 0.173 0.001 | 0.136 0.002 |
| VideoLLaMA2 Cheng et al. (2024) | V + M | 68.37 0.22 | 19.77 0.14 | 21.25 0.26 | 39.18 0.20 | 25.52 0.30 | 0.112 0.002 | 0.131 0.001 | 0.079 0.000 |
| Video-SALMONN 2 Tang et al. (2025) | V + M | 75.56 0.00 | 7.97 0.22 | 22.00 0.31 | 51.89 0.00 | 30.10 0.05 | 0.075 0.001 | 0.094 0.001 | 0.074 0.000 |
| ID | Variant | Modality | Egocentric Grounding | Allocentric Grounding | Spatial Relational Reasoning | ||||
| Direction | Distance | Direction | Distance | Correspondence | Hidden source | Proximity | |||
| Modality ablation | |||||||||
| (a) | Without vision | M + B | |||||||
| (b) | Visual only | V | |||||||
| (c) | Without binaural | V + M | |||||||
| Training ablation | |||||||||
| ID | Model | Pretrain | Sound | Direction | Distance | Visibility |
| (a) | Hear You Are LLM Ryu et al. (2026) | – | ||||
| (b) | Hear You Are LLM Ryu et al. (2026) | ✓ | ||||
| (c) | HLR-LLM | – | ||||
| (d) | HLR-LLM | ✓ |
Appendix figures & tables18 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| ID | Variant | Modality | Spatial Hearing | Egocentric Grounding | Allocentric Grounding | |||
| Sound (Acc. %) | Speech (WER ) | Direction | Distance | Direction | Distance | |||
| Modality ablation | ||||||||
| (a) | Without vision | M + B | ||||||
| (b) | Visual only | V | ||||||
| (c) | Without binaural | V + M | ||||||
| (d) | Without monaural | V + B | ||||||
| ID | Variant | Modality | Spatial Relational Reasoning (Acc. %) | Scene Captioning | ||||||
| Visibility | Correspondence | Hidden source | Loudness | Proximity | CIDEr-D | METEOR | SPIDEr | |||
| Modality ablation | ||||||||||
| (a) | Without vision | M + B | ||||||||
| (b) | Visual only | V | ||||||||
| (c) | Without binaural | V + M | ||||||||
| (d) | Without monaural | V + B | ||||||||
| Model | Sound | Direction | Distance | Visibility |
| VideoLLaMA2 [ 2 ] | ||||
| Video-SALMONN 2 [ 3 ] | ||||
| Qwen2.5-Omni [ 4 ] | ||||
| HLR-LLM (Ours) |
| Type | Bin | Range |
| Azimuth | front | – |
| front-right | – | |
| right | – | |
| back-right | – | |
| back | – | |
| back-left | – |
| Task family | Task | Total | Passed | Failed | Pass rate |
| Spatial hearing | Sound event recognition | 112 | 112 | 0 | 100.0% |
| Far-field ASR | 29 | 29 | 0 | 100.0% | |
| Egocentric grounding | Direction | 98 | 98 | 0 | 100.0% |
| Distance | 98 | 98 | 0 | 100.0% | |
| Allocentric grounding | Direction | 148 | 146 | 2 | 98.6% |
| Distance | 148 | 148 | 0 | 100.0% |
| Task family | Task | Train | Train-CoT | Test | ||||||
| Single | Multi | Total | Single | Multi | Total | Single | Multi | Total | ||
| Spatial hearing | Sound event | 14,794 | 7,054 | 21,848 | – | – | – | 1,498 | 772 | 2,270 |
| Far-field ASR | 2,708 | 867 | 3,575 | – | – | – | 380 | 128 | 508 | |
| Spatial grounding | Egocentric direction | 13,770 | 6,500 | 20,270 | – | – | – | 1,442 | 632 | 2,074 |
| Egocentric distance | 13,770 | 6,500 | 20,270 | – | – | – | 1,442 | 632 | 2,074 | |
| Allocentric direction | 8,410 | 3,909 | 12,319 | 8,086 | 3,735 | 11,821 | 1,454 | 461 | 1,915 | |
| Statistic | Train | Test | Train–Test Overlap |
| Hidden-source distribution | |||
| Off-screen (front) | 2,681 (34.1%) | 408 (27.6%) | – |
| Off-screen (back) | 2,752 (35.0%) | 518 (35.1%) | – |
| Adjacent room | 959 (12.2%) | 237 (16.1%) | – |
| Hidden behind wall | 418 (5.3%) | 123 (8.3%) | – |
| Hidden behind object | 1,056 (13.4%) | 190 (12.9%) | – |
Audio-Visual Understanding
Audio-visual understanding studies how AI combines sound and visual signals to recognize events, speech, people, and scenes over time.
See all 155 papers