aiqbench analysis
The SVHalluc benchmark reveals a critical gap in audio-visual LLMs, showing that state-of-the-art open-source models struggle to align speech semantics with visual signals, often performing near-randomly on this task. While single-modality perception remains strong, these models fail in cross-modality understanding, highlighting the urgent need for improved speech-grounded video comprehension. This finding underscores a fundamental limitation in current architectures that must be addressed to achieve reliable multi-modal reasoning.
SVHalluc: Benchmarking Speech-Vision Hallucination in Audio-Visual Large Language Models
arXiv:2606.02642v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the success of audio-visual large-language models (LLMs), they can produce plausible but ungrounded outputs, termed hallucination. Existing benchmarks focus on environmental sounds (e.g., dog barking) to indicate event occurrence. In contrast, human speech carries fundamentally different, rich semantics and temporal structures, yet it remains unexplored whether current models can accurately align speech content with corresponding visual signals. In this work, we show that speech content can induce hallucinations in audio-visual LLMs. To systematically study this, we introduce SVHalluc, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating speech-vision hallucination in audio-visual LLMs. Our benchmark diagnoses speech-vision hallucinations from two critical and complementary aspects: semantic and temporal. Experimental results demonstrate that state-of-the-art open-source audio-visual LLMs struggle with aligning speech content with corresponding visual signals, with a near-random accuracy on multiple tasks. In contrast, Gemini 2.5 Pro significantly outperforms the open-source models. Our analysis suggests that their failures stem from limited ability in cross-modality understanding, despite strong performance in single-modality perception. Our work uncovers a new and fundamental limitation of current audio-visual LLMs and highlights the need for speech-grounded video comprehension. Project page: https://chenshuang-zhang.github.io/projects/svhalluc/.
Abstract:Despite the success of audio-visual large-language models (LLMs), they can produce plausible but ungrounded outputs, termed hallucination. Existing benchmarks focus on environmental sounds (e.g., dog barking) to indicate event occurrence. In contrast, human speech carries fundamentally different, rich semantics and temporal structures, yet it remains unexplored whether current models can accurately align speech content with corresponding visual signals. In this work, we show that speech content can induce hallucinations in audio-visual LLMs. To systematically study this, we introduce SVHalluc, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating speech-vision hallucination in audio-visual LLMs. Our benchmark diagnoses speech-vision hallucinations from two critical and complementary aspects: semantic and temporal. Experimental results demonstrate that state-of-the-art open-source audio-visual LLMs struggle with aligning speech content with corresponding visual signals, with a near-random accuracy on multiple tasks. In contrast, Gemini 2.5 Pro significantly outperforms the open-source models. Our analysis suggests that their failures stem from limited ability in cross-modality understanding, despite strong performance in single-modality perception. Our work uncovers a new and fundamental limitation of current audio-visual LLMs and highlights the need for speech-grounded video comprehension. Project page: this https URL.
Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Multimedia (cs.MM); Sound (cs.SD)
arXiv:2606.02642 [eess.AS]
(or arXiv:2606.02642v1 [eess.AS] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.02642 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Full text under the publisher's open licence · 218 words
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