RAVEN: Query-Guided Representation Alignment for Question Answering over Audio, Video, Embedded Sensors, and Natural Language

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Main Authors: Biswas, Subrata, Khan, Mohammad Nur Hossain, Islam, Bashima
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Biswas, Subrata
Khan, Mohammad Nur Hossain
Islam, Bashima
author_facet Biswas, Subrata
Khan, Mohammad Nur Hossain
Islam, Bashima
contents Multimodal question answering (QA) often requires identifying which video, audio, or sensor tokens are relevant to the question. Yet modality disagreements are common: off-camera speech, background noise, or motion outside the field of view often mislead fusion models that weight all streams equally. We present RAVEN, a unified QA architecture whose core is QuART, a query-conditioned cross-modal gating module that assigns scalar relevance scores to each token across modalities, enabling the model to amplify informative signals and suppress distractors before fusion. RAVEN is trained through a three-stage pipeline comprising unimodal pretraining, query-aligned fusion, and disagreement-oriented fine-tuning -- each stage targeting a distinct challenge in multi-modal reasoning: representation quality, cross-modal relevance, and robustness to modality mismatch. To support training and evaluation, we release AVS-QA, a dataset of 300K synchronized Audio--Video-Sensor streams paired with automatically generated question-answer pairs. Experimental results on seven multi-modal QA benchmarks -- including egocentric and exocentric tasks -- show that RAVEN achieves up to 14.5\% and 8.0\% gains in accuracy compared to state-of-the-art multi-modal large language models, respectively. Incorporating sensor data provides an additional 16.4\% boost, and the model remains robust under modality corruption, outperforming SOTA baselines by 50.23\%. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/BASHLab/RAVEN.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_17114
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RAVEN: Query-Guided Representation Alignment for Question Answering over Audio, Video, Embedded Sensors, and Natural Language
Biswas, Subrata
Khan, Mohammad Nur Hossain
Islam, Bashima
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Multimedia
Multimodal question answering (QA) often requires identifying which video, audio, or sensor tokens are relevant to the question. Yet modality disagreements are common: off-camera speech, background noise, or motion outside the field of view often mislead fusion models that weight all streams equally. We present RAVEN, a unified QA architecture whose core is QuART, a query-conditioned cross-modal gating module that assigns scalar relevance scores to each token across modalities, enabling the model to amplify informative signals and suppress distractors before fusion. RAVEN is trained through a three-stage pipeline comprising unimodal pretraining, query-aligned fusion, and disagreement-oriented fine-tuning -- each stage targeting a distinct challenge in multi-modal reasoning: representation quality, cross-modal relevance, and robustness to modality mismatch. To support training and evaluation, we release AVS-QA, a dataset of 300K synchronized Audio--Video-Sensor streams paired with automatically generated question-answer pairs. Experimental results on seven multi-modal QA benchmarks -- including egocentric and exocentric tasks -- show that RAVEN achieves up to 14.5\% and 8.0\% gains in accuracy compared to state-of-the-art multi-modal large language models, respectively. Incorporating sensor data provides an additional 16.4\% boost, and the model remains robust under modality corruption, outperforming SOTA baselines by 50.23\%. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/BASHLab/RAVEN.
title RAVEN: Query-Guided Representation Alignment for Question Answering over Audio, Video, Embedded Sensors, and Natural Language
topic Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17114