Does Location Matter? A Black-Box Causal Audit Reveals Model-Dependent Audio Grounding in LALM Hallucination
arXiv:2610.13112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large audio-language models (LALMs) frequently exhibit object hallucination, affirming absent sounds. The dominant mitigation, Audio-Aware Decoding (AAD), contrasts logits under real audio against an all-zero "blank" waveform, flagged by prior review as out-of-distribution. We introduce a black-box causal test that isolates the claimed evidence itself: localize a claim's evidence region via CLAP similarity, remove it by spectral gating, and compar…