Daily Papers — 2026-10-16

2 papers on audio, speech, music, and acoustics.

1. Encoder-Free Multimodal LLMs Learn Implicit Encoders

Authors: David Harwath, Desh Raj, Xavier Velez, Sandra Arcos-Holzinger, Willie Jeng et al.

Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG, eess.AS | Submitted to ICLR 2027

We empirically analyze two recently proposed encoder-free multimodal LLMs, Gemma-4 12B and Inkling-Small. Unlike previous multimodal LLMs, these models do not use modality-specific encoders to extract tokenized embeddings representing audio and image input; instead, they directly feed windows of samples, pixels, or spectral features to the Transformer language model. We analyze whether the early layers of these models learn to function similarly to dedicated audio and visual encoders. We find that these early layers do in fact act as ``implicit encoders,’’ encoding audio and visual inputs in a way that is largely invariant to their cross-modal context. Furthermore, when performing multimodal reasoning tasks, we show that independently encoding the modalities throughout these early model layers achieves the same accuracy as jointly encoding them from the first layer onwards. Finally, we use layer-wise probing to analyze the salient information captured by the implicit encoders and find their behavior to be similar to several popular encoder models.

2. ConvexLLM: Scaling Convex-Hull Speech Interfaces to General-Purpose Audio Intelligence

Authors: Ming-Hao Hsu, Shujie Liu, Yuxuan Hu, Yuxiang Wang, Yingda Shen et al.

Categories: cs.CL, cs.SD, eess.AS

Speech and audio language models connect continuous acoustic representations to decoders pretrained primarily on text data. Most such models use MLP or Q-Former interfaces to map acoustic features into the decoder’s input space, requiring the decoder to learn how to interpret the resulting representations. We investigate whether grounding these representations in the decoder’s existing text embeddings can help it use acoustic information while better preserving its pretrained text capabilities. We present ConvexLLM, a general-purpose speech and audio language model whose C-Gate interface represents audio as continuous convex combinations of frozen text embeddings. ConvexLLM achieves an eleven-task VoiceBench aggregate of 75.36, the highest among the open-weight models we compare, and an MMAU Test-mini accuracy of 62.50%. Its largest margins over the baselines are on spoken knowledge and reasoning tasks, while the strongest baselines are more accurate on audio understanding and transcription. In a comparison with a 2B-parameter decoder, C-Gate achieves higher aggregate spoken-language performance than MLP and Q-Former interfaces, with text-task performance close to MLP and task-dependent tradeoffs in transcription and audio understanding. These results support convex combinations of text embeddings as a viable interface for general-purpose speech and audio language models.