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RetroThinker: Enabling Retrospective Thinking in Speech LLMs

arxiv.org/abs/2609.11864

quality89

Updated 6 h ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294G5CAWGFDPM5X597E8BC2

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 6 h ago
arXiv
2609.11864
T1 · 6 h ago
Category
eess.AS
T1 · 6 h ago

Abstract

Speech large language models (SpeechLLMs) offer reduced latency and retain paralinguistic nuances that are typically lost in cascaded automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-based LM architectures. However, they continue to lag behind text-only LLMs on complex reasoning tasks, while real-time spoken interaction imposes strict latency constraints. Although prior works employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and concurrent reasoning to enhance reasoning capabilities without inducing prohibitive delays, an inherent accuracy-latency trade-off persists. In this paper, we investigate whether a streaming SpeechLLM can dynamically revise its reasoning traces on the fly. We introduce RetroThinker, a multi-stage post-training framework that equips the Moshi model to self-verify and forward-correct CoT steps during inference. RetroThinker combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on curated retrospective thinking data with length-based direct preference optimization (DPO) to optimize retrospective during early reasoning (i.e., reasoning concurrently while the user speaks). Evaluated on the GSM8K benchmark, RetroThinker significantly improves the accuracy-latency trade-off over non-retrospective baselines, achieving an 11% absolute accuracy gain at a comparable latency.

Authors 4

Yi-Jen Shih, Puyuan Peng, Abdelrahman Mohamed, David Harwath

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh

Arxiv announce type
cross

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh

arXiv id
2609.11864

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh

Categories
eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.CL

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh

Primary category
eess.AS

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

6 h ago

Conflicts

None