Compositional Failure in Audio-Visual LLMs: Late-Layer Prior Dominance Under Cross-modal Conflict

Abstract:We study audio-visual conflict as a compositional generalization test for AV-LLMs: the model must combine synchronized but semantically incompatible audio and video evidence and decide whether the pair matches. On VideoLLaMA 2-7B-AV, three alignment configurations remain nearchance on the scored exact-string Yes/No subset of AVHBench, even though their output priors shift substantially. Similarly, off-the-shelf InternVideo2 experienced a 32.3% accuracy decrease specifically under cross-modal conflict, accompanied by a 17.3% instruction-following failure. We call this failure mode prior dominance: late-layer commitment to an internally preferred answer pattern that is weakly grounded in the conflicting inputs. To explain this behavior, we conduct a mechanistic interpretability analysis and find that commitment remains concentrated at 25.5 $\pm$ 1 layers. We show that stronger temporal alignment changes answer bias, but do not improve compositional conflict resolution. Code and data to reproduce our mechanistic audit and behavioral evaluations are available at this https URL.

Accepted to the 2nd Workshop on Compositional Learning at ICML 2026. 7 pages, 4 figures

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2608.27785 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.27785v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.27785 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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