Audio and video combined improve reasoning in ai models
OmniReasoning: Pushing the Limits of Audio-Visual Joint Reasoning
Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
Summary
Many AI systems struggle to understand information from both sound and images at the same time. The authors created a new test and large datasets that specifically require AI to use audio and visual clues together to answer questions. They also designed a training method that helps models learn how to pay attention to both types of clues properly. Their improved AI model performs better on tests requiring this combined understanding than previous versions. This work helps move toward AI that can reason about what it sees and hears jointly.
What this means in practice
- •For video content platforms: Enable automated understanding and question answering that require joint audio and visual cues in videos, improving content indexing and retrieval.
- •For multimedia app developers: Build apps that interpret both sound and images together to provide smarter audio-visual interactions and insights.
Authors
Junming Lin, Yuxuan Wang, Zhenxin Lei, Yuxin Liu, Ruixun Liu, Yinsong Yan, Ling Wang, Minghao Han, Yunfei Chu, Shun Lei, Xueyao Zhang, Qize Yang, Jin Xu, Yiwu Zhong
Abstract
Recent advances have enabled unified omni-modal models in understanding audio, vision, and language. However, existing benchmarks, training data, and learning methods largely treat the modalities independently, leaving the capability of audio-visual joint reasoning poorly evaluated and insufficiently elicited. We address this gap with a benchmark, data engine, and learning method. First, we introduce OmniReasoningBench, a benchmark where both audio and visual evidence are indispensable. It comprises 1,150 multiple-choice and open-ended questions across two tasks, reasoning over video and reasoning beyond video. Second, we develop a data engine OmniQA. It automatically constructs evidence-grounded QA pairs that explicitly necessitate audio-visual joint reasoning, together with time-stamped clue chains that guide the annotation of thinking process. Besides our benchmark, this engine produces training data OmniReasoning-SFT-112K and OmniReasoning-RL-19K. Finally, we propose an on-policy self-distillation method Modality-Factored Self-Distillation (MFSD). It evaluates each sampled response under modality-specific clue contexts, disentangling the contributions of individual clues and their cross-modal interactions for token-level credit assignment. With our training data and learning method, our model OmniReasoning-30B-A3B achieves 50.0% on OmniVideoBench and 42.5% on OmniReasoningBench, improving the base model Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Thinking by 12.8 and 9.3 percentage points, respectively. Moreover, it delivers substantial gains on general and long-video benchmarks, including Video-MME-v2. We hope our work offers a solid step for facilitating future research in omni-modal joint reasoning.