Seeing Sound, Hearing Sight: Uncovering Modality Bias and Conflict of AI models in Sound Localization
Imagine hearing a dog bark and turning toward the sound only to see a parked car, while the real, silent dog sits elsewhere. Such sensory conflicts test perception, yet humans reliably resolve them by prioritizing sound over misleading visuals. Despite advances in multimodal AI integrating vision and audio, little is known about how these systems handle cross-modal conflicts or whether they favor one modality. In this study, we systematically examine modality bias and conflict resolution in AI sound localization. We assess leading multimodal models and benchmark them against human performance in psychophysics experiments across six audiovisual conditions, including congruent, conflicting, and absent cues. Humans consistently outperform AI, demonstrating superior resilience to conflicting or missing visuals by relying on auditory information. In contrast, AI models often default to visual input, degrading performance to near chance levels. To address this, we finetune a state-of-the-art model using a stereo audio-image dataset generated via 3D simulations. Even with limited training data, the refined model surpasses existing benchmarks. Notably, it also mirrors human-like horizontal localization bias favoring left-right precision-likely due to the stereo audio structure reflecting human ear placement. These findings underscore how sensory input quality and system architecture shape multimodal representation accuracy.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Learning to Hear by Seeing: It's Time for Vision Language Models to Understand Artistic Emotion from Sight and Sound
Emotion understanding is critical for making Large Language Models (LLMs) more general, reliable, and aligned with humans. Art conveys emotion through the joint design of visual and auditory elements, yet most prior work…
One Model, Multiple Modalities: A Sparsely Activated Approach for Text, Sound, Image, Video and Code
People perceive the world with multiple senses (e.g., through hearing sounds, reading words and seeing objects). However, most existing AI systems only process an individual modality. This paper presents an approach that…
Image RetrievalRetrievalEgoSound: Benchmarking Sound Understanding in Egocentric Videos
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress in vision-language understanding. Yet, human perception is inherently multisensory, integrating sight, sound, and motion to reason about…
Causal InferenceSeeing and Hearing: Open-domain Visual-Audio Generation with Diffusion Latent Aligners
Video and audio content creation serves as the core technique for the movie industry and professional users. Recently, existing diffusion-based methods tackle video and audio generation separately, which hinders the tech…
Audio GenerationDenoisingDoes Hearing Help Seeing? Investigating Audio-Video Joint Denoising for Video Generation
Recent audio-video generative systems suggest that coupling modalities benefits not only audio-video synchrony but also the video modality itself. We pose a fundamental question: Does audio-video joint denoising training…
Video Generation