The Bairong System for MLC-SLM 2026: Dynamic Question-Aware Evidence Routing for Multilingual Conversational Speech Understanding

arXiv:2609.22214v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long multilingual conversational spoken question answering requires systems to balance long-range transcript semantics with sparse acoustic and speaker-sensitive cues. We present the Bairong system for the MLC-SLM 2026 Challenge, where a diarization-ASR front-end produces speaker-attributed transcripts and a dynamic evidence router constructs question-specific inputs for answer prediction. Instead of applying a fixed transcript-only or audio-only policy, the router infers the required evidence type and context scope from the question and answer options, and selects among full transcript context, local audio-text fusion, speaker-linked evidence, and compact global acoustic samples. This transcript-backbone design keeps discourse context available while activating audio only when it provides complementary evidence. Our Task 1 system achieves 25.70% and 18.44% tcpMER on the development and evaluation sets. For Task 2, the final system obtains 94.84% devel?opment accuracy, outperforming the full-transcript baseline by 1.68 points and the best audio-centric diagnostic system by 2.77 points. These results support dynamic question-aware routing as an effective evidence allocation strategy for conversational spoken QA.