A frozen general-audio codec can locate sounds too: AURA beats the strongest dedicated system by 10.31 points in dual-source direction accuracy
AURA couples X-Codec, a general-audio codec trained without spatial supervision, directly to a frozen Qwen3-8B language model through a six-slot binaural representation and scene supervision. Dedicated spatial systems instead rely on a separately trained spatial encoder, and an answer-only interface stays at chance on left/right. On dual-source SpatialSoundQA, AURA's direction accuracy exceeds the strongest dedicated system, DSpAST-BAT†, by 10.31 points with about 40% of its trainable parameters.