🏆 ICLR 2026

Incentivizing Consistent, Effective and Scalable Reasoning Capability in Audio LLMs via Reasoning Process Rewards

CESAR: Consistent, Effective, and Scalable Audio Reasoners

Jiajun Fan 1,2, Roger Ren 2, Jingyuan Li 2, Rahul Pandey 2, Prashanth G. Shivakumar 2, Ivan Bulyko 2, Ankur Gandhe 2, Ge Liu 1, Yile Gu 2
1University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign    2Amazon
📄 Paper (OpenReview) arXiv 🏠 Author Homepage
TL;DR — Audio LLMs trained only on outcome rewards produce hallucinatory, inconsistent, and unscalable reasoning chains. CESAR shifts to rewarding the reasoning process itself via online RL (GRPO), resolving test-time inverse scaling and achieving SOTA on MMAU — outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-4o Audio.
CESAR Framework Overview
Figure 1. General framework comparison of different training paradigms for Audio LLMs. CESAR's process rewards incentivize consistency, structured analytical reasoning, and calibrated depth — resolving test-time inverse scaling and enabling reasoning to genuinely help performance.

🔍 The Problem

Adding chain-of-thought reasoning to Audio LLMs often degrades performance — a phenomenon we term test-time inverse scaling. Longer reasoning chains yield progressively worse results. Why?

❌ Without CESAR

Models without guidance for the reasoning process produce hallucinatory, inconsistent reasoning that accumulates errors over longer chains. Outcome-only rewards cannot fix this.

✅ With CESAR

Process rewards incentivize consistency, structured analytical patterns, causal reasoning, and calibrated depth — transforming reasoning from a liability into a genuine capability.

⚙️ Method

CESAR uses Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a multi-faceted reward suite that goes beyond simple correctness:

1

Correctness Reward

Standard outcome reward — is the final answer right?

2

Consistency Reward

Does the reasoning chain stay internally consistent?

3

Structure Reward

Does the reasoning follow structured analytical patterns and causal logic?

4

Depth Calibration

Is the reasoning depth calibrated to task complexity? Avoid over- and under-thinking.

📊 Results

SOTA
MMAU Test-mini
benchmark
> 2.5 Pro
Outperforms
Gemini 2.5 Pro
> GPT-4o
Outperforms
GPT-4o Audio
✓ Scale
Reasoning scales
positively at test time
ModelMMAU Test-miniReasoning Scaling
GPT-4o Audio~65%❌ Inverse scaling
Gemini 2.5 Pro~68%❌ Inverse scaling
Baseline (outcome-only RL)~63%❌ Inverse scaling
CESAR (Ours)SOTA Best✅ Positive scaling

🏗️ Framework Architecture

CESAR framework with scaling
Figure 2. Complete CESAR training pipeline with scaling analysis. Process rewards decompose reasoning quality into consistency, structure, and depth calibration — enabling stable, scalable reasoning improvement.

📈 Test-Time Scaling Analysis

Test-time scaling curves
Figure 3. Test-time scaling curves. Baselines exhibit inverse scaling; CESAR maintains positive scaling as reasoning tokens increase.
Win rate at different scales
Figure 4. Win rate analysis at different reasoning token budgets — CESAR's advantage grows with more compute.

🎯 Multi-Dimensional Evaluation

Performance radar chart
Figure 5. Multi-dimensional performance radar showing CESAR's balanced improvement across all reasoning quality dimensions.
Token-level radar chart
Figure 6. Token-level radar comparison showing how CESAR improves reasoning quality even at the individual token level.

📉 Training Dynamics & Win Rate

Training curves
Figure 7. Training reward curves showing stable convergence of CESAR's multi-faceted process rewards.
AI Judge win rate analysis
Figure 8. AI judge win rates — CESAR consistently wins across multiple evaluation dimensions and prompts.

📐 Scaling Slope Ablation

The scaling slope measures whether additional reasoning tokens help or hurt. A positive slope means more thinking = better results.

CESAR scaling slope
Figure 9. CESAR achieves consistent positive scaling slope — the only method where reasoning genuinely helps.
Slope ablation
Figure 10. Ablation: removing the overthinking penalty degrades slope — every component in CESAR's reward suite matters.
Qwen baseline slope
Figure 11. Qwen2.5-Omni baseline shows flat/negative scaling — without process rewards, reasoning doesn't scale.

📅 Publication Journey

Oct 2025
arXiv preprint released (arXiv:2510.20867)
Oct 2025
Submitted to ICLR 2026 (Submission #8335)
Submitted to The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations.
Jan 2026
✅ Accepted at ICLR 2026 (Poster)
Accepted. OpenReview
Apr 2026
Presented at ICLR 2026 · Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

📖 BibTeX

@inproceedings{fan2026incentivizing,
  title={Incentivizing Consistent, Effective and Scalable Reasoning
         Capability in Audio {LLM}s via Reasoning Process Rewards},
  author={Jiajun Fan and Roger Ren and Jingyuan Li and Rahul Pandey and
          Prashanth Gurunath Shivakumar and Ivan Bulyko
          and Ankur Gandhe and Ge Liu and Yile Gu},
  booktitle={The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year={2026},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=DUr48hxO2h}
}