Confidence-Aware Aggregation for Multimodal Audio Reasoning

Abstract

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) enable generative reasoning over complex acoustic scenes but often exhibit prediction instability. We show that this variability can serve as a reliability metric via inference-time self-consistency and confidence-aware aggregation. Using a log-probability--based scoring framework, candidate answers are weighted by model likelihoods, leveraging reasoning diversity and self-certainty without additional training. Experiments on four LALMs, including Qwen3-Omni and Audio Flamingo 3, demonstrate that confidence-aware aggregation improves accuracy and calibration, with additive methods like Borda voting outperforming classical Majority Vote, especially under high disagreement. This approach transforms LALM variability into a source of reliability for scalable and robust multimodal audio understanding. Project code is available at https://github.com/michelolzam/lalm-self-consistency.