Do Audio-Visual Large Language Models Really See and Hear?
Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AVLLMs) are emerging as unified interfaces to multimodal perception. We present the first mechanistic interpretability study of AVLLMs, analyzing how audio and visual features evolve and fuse through different layers of an AVLLM to produce the final text outputs. We find that although AVLLMs encode rich audio semantics at intermediate layers, these capabilities largely fail to surface in the final text generation when audio conflicts with vision. Probing analyses show that useful latent audio information is present, but deeper fusion layers disproportionately privilege visual representations that tend to suppress audio cues. We further trace this imbala...
| Authors | Ramaneswaran Selvakumar, Kaousheik Jayakumar, S Sakshi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 3 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 April 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.