# Relevant Evidence Decoding for Audio-Visual Hallucination Mitigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02976 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02976/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckList](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04118/) (2020)
- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-Omni Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20215/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models through Visual Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16922/) (2023)
- [HallusionBench: An Advanced Diagnostic Suite for Entangled Language Hallucination and Visual Illusion in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14566/) (2023)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models Are Not Robust Multiple Choice Selectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03882/) (2023)
- [Learning the Difference that Makes a Difference with Counterfactually-Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12434/) (2019)
- [DoLa: Decoding by Contrasting Layers Improves Factuality in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03883/) (2023)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09683/) (2023)
- [Trusting Your Evidence: Hallucinate Less with Context-aware Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14739/) (2023)
- [Multi-Modal Hallucination Control by Visual Information Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14003/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models with Instruction Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18715/) (2024)
- [Learning to Answer Questions in Dynamic Audio-Visual Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14072/) (2022)
- [Causal Inference in Natural Language Processing: Estimation, Prediction, Interpretation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00725/) (2021)
- [Can I Trust Your Answer? Visually Grounded Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01327/) (2023)
- [Batch Calibration: Rethinking Calibration for In-Context Learning and Prompt Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17249/) (2023)
- [Self-Introspective Decoding: Alleviating Hallucinations for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02032/) (2024)
- [VidHalluc: Evaluating Temporal Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03735/) (2024)
- [AVHBench: A Cross-Modal Hallucination Benchmark for Audio-Visual Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18325/) (2024)
- [The Curse of Multi-Modalities: Evaluating Hallucinations of Large Multimodal Models across Language, Visual, and Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12787/) (2024)
- [CODE: Contrasting Self-generated Description to Combat Hallucination in Large Multi-modal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01920/) (2024)
- [AVCD: Mitigating Hallucinations in Audio-Visual Large Language Models through Contrastive Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20862/) (2025)
- [Diagnosing and Mitigating Modality Interference in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19616/) (2025)
- [Fine-grained Audible Video Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15616/) (2023)
- [Grounding Language with Vision: A Conditional Mutual Information Calibrated Decoding Strategy for Reducing Hallucinations in LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19678/) (2025)
- [ONLY: One-Layer Intervention Sufficiently Mitigates Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00898/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-Visual Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) remain prone to cross-modal hallucinations, where one modality incorrectly affects predictions about another. Although contrastive decoding reduces hallucinations in vision-language models, its direct extension to AV-LLMs overlooks a key challenge: different questions require different perceptual evidence, including audio, video, or their interaction. Notably, we observe that joint audio-visual inference can weaken the prediction even when a model can recover the correct answer from a single informative modality. For example, when asked which instrument is heard, a model may correctly predict violin from the audio alone. Once a video showing a guitar is added, its confidence in violin may drop. In this paper, we introduce Relevant Evidence Decoding (RED), a training-free method that identifies question-relevant evidence and selectively strengthens its contribution. RED uses pointwise mutual information to quantify the predictive support provided by audio and video beyond the question alone. It decomposes their joint contribution into audio, video, and residual interaction components. A question-only inference pass determines the required evidence type, after which the model augments the original audio-visual prediction with the corresponding PMI contribution. Across three audio-visual hallucination benchmarks and three AV-LLMs, RED improves accuracy over standard decoding by up to 7% on CMM, 6.3% on AVHBench, and 3.8% on SVHalluc, with an average relative time to first token of 1.5x standard decoding.