SonicWorld: Source-Centric Latent Dynamics for Spatial Audio Reasoning

Chenlong Wei, Hanling Wang, Mingjin Lou, Yufan Shi, Yandong Sun +4

Dynamic spatial audio reasoning requires a model to associate changing acoustic observations with the correct source and recover its spatial state at a queried time or interval, a challenge intensified by overlapping speech and source motion. To study this problem, we introduce Sonic-Bench, comprising 2.8K first-order Ambisonics clips and 28.8K target-specific question-answer pairs across 480 simulated indoor scenes. The benchmark covers localization, distance estimation, and motion reasoning in single- and dual-source settings. We further propose SonicWorld, which integrates physical, learned acoustic, and semantic features into persistent source states through learned transitions and recurrent updates, and projects them into an Omni LLM for spatial reasoning. Compared with Spatial-Omni on the Sonic-Bench test split, SonicWorld improves direction accuracy from 31.98% to 34.69% and reduces azimuth error from 57.22° to 48.01°. In zero-shot transfer to Spatial LibriSpeech, SonicWorld retains strong localization performance, achieving 73.98% direction accuracy and 19.29° azimuth error, compared with 27.14% and 70.74° for Spatial-Omni.