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Main Authors: Ye, Qilang, Zeng, Wei, Liu, Meng, Zhang, Jie, Hu, Yupeng, Yu, Zitong, Zhou, Yu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10059
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author Ye, Qilang
Zeng, Wei
Liu, Meng
Zhang, Jie
Hu, Yupeng
Yu, Zitong
Zhou, Yu
author_facet Ye, Qilang
Zeng, Wei
Liu, Meng
Zhang, Jie
Hu, Yupeng
Yu, Zitong
Zhou, Yu
contents Can Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) discern confused objects that are visually present but audio-absent? To study this, we introduce a new benchmark, AV-ConfuseBench, which simulates an ``Audio-Visual Confusion'' scene by modifying the corresponding sound of an object in the video, e.g., mute the sounding object and ask MLLMs Is there a/an muted-object sound''. Experimental results reveal that MLLMs, such as Qwen2.5-Omni and Gemini 2.5, struggle to discriminate non-existent audio due to visually dominated reasoning. Motivated by this observation, we introduce RL-CoMM, a Reinforcement Learning-based Collaborative Multi-MLLM that is built upon the Qwen2.5-Omni foundation. RL-CoMM includes two stages: 1) To alleviate visually dominated ambiguities, we introduce an external model, a Large Audio Language Model (LALM), as the reference model to generate audio-only reasoning. Then, we design a Step-wise Reasoning Reward function that enables MLLMs to self-improve audio-visual reasoning with the audio-only reference. 2) To ensure an accurate answer prediction, we introduce Answer-centered Confidence Optimization to reduce the uncertainty of potential heterogeneous reasoning differences. Extensive experiments on audio-visual question answering and audio-visual hallucination show that RL-CoMM improves the accuracy by 10~30\% over the baseline model with limited training data. Follow: https://github.com/rikeilong/AVConfusion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_10059
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When Eyes and Ears Disagree: Can MLLMs Discern Audio-Visual Confusion?
Ye, Qilang
Zeng, Wei
Liu, Meng
Zhang, Jie
Hu, Yupeng
Yu, Zitong
Zhou, Yu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Can Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) discern confused objects that are visually present but audio-absent? To study this, we introduce a new benchmark, AV-ConfuseBench, which simulates an ``Audio-Visual Confusion'' scene by modifying the corresponding sound of an object in the video, e.g., mute the sounding object and ask MLLMs Is there a/an muted-object sound''. Experimental results reveal that MLLMs, such as Qwen2.5-Omni and Gemini 2.5, struggle to discriminate non-existent audio due to visually dominated reasoning. Motivated by this observation, we introduce RL-CoMM, a Reinforcement Learning-based Collaborative Multi-MLLM that is built upon the Qwen2.5-Omni foundation. RL-CoMM includes two stages: 1) To alleviate visually dominated ambiguities, we introduce an external model, a Large Audio Language Model (LALM), as the reference model to generate audio-only reasoning. Then, we design a Step-wise Reasoning Reward function that enables MLLMs to self-improve audio-visual reasoning with the audio-only reference. 2) To ensure an accurate answer prediction, we introduce Answer-centered Confidence Optimization to reduce the uncertainty of potential heterogeneous reasoning differences. Extensive experiments on audio-visual question answering and audio-visual hallucination show that RL-CoMM improves the accuracy by 10~30\% over the baseline model with limited training data. Follow: https://github.com/rikeilong/AVConfusion.
title When Eyes and Ears Disagree: Can MLLMs Discern Audio-Visual Confusion?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10059