@inproceedings{mao-etal-2026-scaling,
    title = "When Scaling Fails: Mitigating Audio Perception Decay of {LALM}s via Multi-Step Perception-Aware Reasoning",
    author = "Mao, Ruixiang  and
      Ma, Xiangnan  and
      Chen, Dan  and
      Zhu, Ziming  and
      Ge, Yuan  and
      Zhao, Haishu  and
      Hao, AoKai  and
      Huo, Yifu  and
      Yang, Qing  and
      Chang, Kaiyan  and
      Liu, Xiaoqian  and
      Wang, Chenglong  and
      Shan, Weiqiao  and
      He, Qiaozhi  and
      Li, Changliang  and
      Yu, Zhengtao  and
      Xiao, Tong  and
      Zhu, JingBo",
    editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi  and
      Dev, Sunipa  and
      Li, Jessy  and
      Elliott, Desmond",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = oct,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Budapest, Hungary",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.495/",
    pages = "11370--11393",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0"
}