README.md

---
title: Audio Reasoning & Step-Audio-R1 Explorer
emoji: 🎧
colorFrom: purple
colorTo: blue
sdk: gradio
sdk_version: 4.44.0
app_file: app.py
pinned: false
license: cc-by-4.0
short_description: Interactive guide to audio reasoning and Step-Audio-R1 model
tags:
  - audio
  - reasoning
  - multimodal
  - step-audio-r1
  - LALM
  - chain-of-thought
  - education
---

# 🎧 Audio Reasoning & Step-Audio-R1 Explorer

An interactive educational space exploring the groundbreaking concepts behind **audio reasoning** and the **Step-Audio-R1** model.

---

## 🎯 What is Audio Reasoning?

Audio reasoning is an AI model's ability to perform **deliberate, multi-step thinking processes** over audio inputs. This goes far beyond simple speech recognition (ASR) or audio classification.

**Step-Audio-R1** is the first model to successfully unlock reasoning capabilities in the audio domain, solving the "inverted scaling anomaly" that plagued previous audio language models.

---

## 🚀 Features of This Space

| Tab | Content |
| :--- | :--- |
| **🏠 Introduction** | Overview of audio reasoning and key achievements. |
| **🧠 Reasoning Types** | Interactive explorer for 5 types of audio reasoning. |
| **🚫 The Problem** | Understanding the inverted scaling anomaly. |
| **🔬 MGRD Solution** | How Modality-Grounded Reasoning Distillation works. |
| **🏗️ Architecture** | Step-Audio-R1 model architecture breakdown. |
| **📊 Benchmarks** | Performance comparisons and results. |
| **🎮 Interactive Demo** | Simulated audio reasoning examples. |
| **🚀 Applications** | Real-world use cases. |
| **📚 Resources** | Papers, code, and references. |

---

## 🔬 Key Innovation: MGRD

**Modality-Grounded Reasoning Distillation (MGRD)** is the core innovation that makes Step-Audio-R1 work. It transforms the training process:

> **Text-based reasoning** → **Filter textual surrogates** → **Keep acoustic-grounded chains** → **Native Audio Think**

This iterative process teaches the model to reason over **actual acoustic features** instead of text transcripts.

---

## 📊 Performance

Step-Audio-R1 achieves remarkable results in the audio domain:

* ✅ **Surpasses Gemini 2.5 Pro** on comprehensive audio benchmarks.
* ✅ **Comparable to Gemini 3 Pro** (state-of-the-art).
* ✅ **First successful test-time compute scaling** for audio.

---

## 📚 Resources

* 📄 **Step-Audio-R1 Paper**
* 💻 **GitHub Repository**
* 🤗 **HuggingFace Collection**
* 🎯 **Official Demo**

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## 👤 Author

**Mehmet Tuğrul Kaya**

* 🐙 **GitHub:** [@mtkaya](https://github.com/mtkaya)
* 🤗 **HuggingFace:** [tugrulkaya](https://huggingface.co/tugrulkaya)

### 📝 Citation

If you find this work useful, please cite the original paper:

```bibtex
@article{stepaudioR1,
  title={Step-Audio-R1 Technical Report},
  author={Tian, Fei and others},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.15848},
  year={2025}
}