AudSemThinker: Enhancing Audio-Language Models through Reasoning over Semantics of Sound

Audio-language models have shown promising results in various sound understanding tasks, yet they remain limited in their ability to reason over the fine-grained semantics of sound. In this paper, we present AUDSEMTHINKER, a model whose reasoning is structured around a framework of auditory semantics inspired by human cognition. To support this, we introduce AUDSEM, a novel dataset specifically curated for semantic descriptor reasoning in audio-language models. AUDSEM addresses the persistent challenge of data contamination in zero-shot evaluations by providing a carefully filtered collection of audio samples paired with captions generated through a robust multi-stage pipeline. Our experiments demonstrate that AUDSEMTHINKER outperforms state-of-the-art models across multiple training settings, highlighting its strength in semantic audio reasoning.