Probing Cross-modal Information Hubs in Audio-Visual LLMs

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Hauptverfasser: Jung, Jihoo, Jung, Chaeyoung, Kim, Ji-Hoon, Chung, Joon Son
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Jung, Jihoo
Jung, Chaeyoung
Kim, Ji-Hoon
Chung, Joon Son
author_facet Jung, Jihoo
Jung, Chaeyoung
Kim, Ji-Hoon
Chung, Joon Son
contents Audio-visual large language models (AVLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful architecture capable of jointly reasoning over audio, visual, and textual modalities. In AVLLMs, the bidirectional interaction between audio and video modalities introduces intricate processing dynamics, necessitating a deeper understanding of their internal mechanisms. However, unlike extensively studied text-only or large vision language models, the internal workings of AVLLMs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we focus on cross-modal information flow between audio and visual modalities in AVLLMs, investigating where information derived from one modality is encoded within the token representations of the other modality. Through an analysis of multiple recent AVLLMs, we uncover two common findings. First, AVLLMs primarily encode integrated audio-visual information in sink tokens. Second, sink tokens do not uniformly hold cross-modal information. Instead, a distinct subset of sink tokens, which we term cross-modal sink tokens, specializes in storing such information. Based on these findings, we further propose a simple training-free hallucination mitigation method by encouraging reliance on integrated cross-modal information within cross-modal sink tokens. Our code is available at https://github.com/kaistmm/crossmodal-hub.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_10815
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Probing Cross-modal Information Hubs in Audio-Visual LLMs
Jung, Jihoo
Jung, Chaeyoung
Kim, Ji-Hoon
Chung, Joon Son
Artificial Intelligence
Audio and Speech Processing
Audio-visual large language models (AVLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful architecture capable of jointly reasoning over audio, visual, and textual modalities. In AVLLMs, the bidirectional interaction between audio and video modalities introduces intricate processing dynamics, necessitating a deeper understanding of their internal mechanisms. However, unlike extensively studied text-only or large vision language models, the internal workings of AVLLMs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we focus on cross-modal information flow between audio and visual modalities in AVLLMs, investigating where information derived from one modality is encoded within the token representations of the other modality. Through an analysis of multiple recent AVLLMs, we uncover two common findings. First, AVLLMs primarily encode integrated audio-visual information in sink tokens. Second, sink tokens do not uniformly hold cross-modal information. Instead, a distinct subset of sink tokens, which we term cross-modal sink tokens, specializes in storing such information. Based on these findings, we further propose a simple training-free hallucination mitigation method by encouraging reliance on integrated cross-modal information within cross-modal sink tokens. Our code is available at https://github.com/kaistmm/crossmodal-hub.
title Probing Cross-modal Information Hubs in Audio-Visual LLMs
topic Artificial Intelligence
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10815