Youngjoon Jang

Chaeyoung Jung, Youngjoon Jang, Joon Son Chung

Hallucination remains a major challenge in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). To address this, various contrastive decoding (CD) methods have been proposed that contrasts original logits with hallucinated logits generated from perturbed inputs. While CD has shown promise in vision-language models (VLMs), it is not well-suited for AV-LLMs, where hallucinations often emerge from both unimodal and cross-modal combinations involving audio, video, and language. These intricate interactions call for a more adaptive and modality-aware decoding strategy. In this paper, we propose Audio-Visual Contrastive Decoding (AVCD)-a novel, training-free decoding framework designed to model trimodal interactions and suppress modality-induced hallucinations in AV-LLMs. Unlike previous CD methods in VLMs that corrupt a fixed modality, AVCD leverages attention distributions to dynamically identify less dominant modalities and applies attentive masking to generate perturbed output logits. To support CD in a trimodal setting, we also reformulate the original CD framework to jointly handle audio, visual, and textual inputs. Finally, to improve efficiency, we introduce entropy-guided adaptive decoding, which selectively skips unnecessary decoding steps based on the model's confidence in its predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AVCD consistently outperforms existing decoding methods. Especially, on the AVHBench dataset, it improves accuracy by 2% for VideoLLaMA2 and 7% for video-SALMONN, demonstrating strong robustness and generalizability. Our code is available at https://github.com/kaistmm/AVCD.

Jaemin Jung, Youngjoon Jang, Joon Son Chung

The goal of this paper is to enhance face recognition performance by augmenting head poses during the testing phase. Existing methods often rely on training on frontalised images or learning pose-invariant representations, yet both approaches typically require re-training and testing for each dataset, involving a substantial amount of effort. In contrast, this study proposes Pose-TTA, a novel approach that aligns faces at inference time without additional training. To achieve this, we employ a portrait animator that transfers the source image identity into the pose of a driving image. Instead of frontalising a side-profile face -- which can introduce distortion -- Pose-TTA generates matching side-profile images for comparison, thereby reducing identity information loss. Furthermore, we propose a weighted feature aggregation strategy to address any distortions or biases arising from the synthetic data, thus enhancing the reliability of the augmented images. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets and with various pre-trained face recognition models demonstrate that Pose-TTA consistently improves inference performance. Moreover, our method is straightforward to integrate into existing face recognition pipelines, as it requires no retraining or fine-tuning of the underlying recognition models.

Chaeyoung Jung, Youngjoon Jang, Seungwoo Lee et al.

In this work, we present FastAV, the first token pruning framework tailored for audio-visual large language models (AV-LLMs). While token pruning has been actively explored in standard large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (LVLMs), its application to AV-LLMs has received little attention, even though multimodal integration substantially increases their token demands. To address this gap, we introduce a pruning strategy that utilizes attention weights to identify tokens emphasized at different stages and estimates their importance. Building on this analysis, FastAV applies a two-stage pruning strategy: (1) global pruning in intermediate layers to remove broadly less influential tokens, and (2) fine pruning in later layers considering the impact on next token generation. Notably, our method does not rely on full attention maps, which makes it fully compatible with efficient attention mechanisms such as FlashAttention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FastAV reduces FLOPs by more than 40% on two representative AV-LLMs, while preserving or even improving model performance.

Youngjoon Jang, Seongtae Hong, Junyoung Son et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a crucial framework in natural language processing (NLP), improving factual consistency and reducing hallucinations by integrating external document retrieval with large language models (LLMs). However, the effectiveness of RAG is often hindered by coreferential complexity in retrieved documents, introducing ambiguity that disrupts in-context learning. In this study, we systematically investigate how entity coreference affects both document retrieval and generative performance in RAG-based systems, focusing on retrieval relevance, contextual understanding, and overall response quality. We demonstrate that coreference resolution enhances retrieval effectiveness and improves question-answering (QA) performance. Through comparative analysis of different pooling strategies in retrieval tasks, we find that mean pooling demonstrates superior context capturing ability after applying coreference resolution. In QA tasks, we discover that smaller models benefit more from the disambiguation process, likely due to their limited inherent capacity for handling referential ambiguity. With these findings, this study aims to provide a deeper understanding of the challenges posed by coreferential complexity in RAG, providing guidance for improving retrieval and generation in knowledge-intensive AI applications.

Chaeyoung Jung, Youngjoon Jang, Jongmin Choi et al.

The goal of this work is to enhance balanced multimodal understanding in audio-visual large language models (AV-LLMs) by addressing modality bias without additional training. In current AV-LLMs, audio and video features are typically processed jointly in the decoder. While this strategy facilitates unified multimodal understanding, it may introduce modality bias, where the model tends to over-rely on one modality due to imbalanced training signals. To mitigate this, we propose Fork-Merge Decoding (FMD), a simple yet effective inference-time strategy that requires no additional training or architectural modifications. FMD first performs modality-specific reasoning by processing audio-only and video-only inputs through the early decoder layers (fork), and then merges the resulting hidden states for joint reasoning in the remaining layers (merge). This separation allows each modality to be emphasized in the early stages while encouraging balanced contributions during integration. We validate our method on three representative AV-LLMs-VideoLLaMA2, video-SALMONN, and Qwen2.5-Omni-using three benchmark datasets. Experimental results show consistent gains in audio, video, and audio-visual reasoning tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of inference-time interventions for robust and efficient multimodal understanding.

Tan Dat Nguyen, Ji-Hoon Kim, Youngjoon Jang et al.

The goal of this paper is to generate realistic audio with a lightweight and fast diffusion-based vocoder, named FreGrad. Our framework consists of the following three key components: (1) We employ discrete wavelet transform that decomposes a complicated waveform into sub-band wavelets, which helps FreGrad to operate on a simple and concise feature space, (2) We design a frequency-aware dilated convolution that elevates frequency awareness, resulting in generating speech with accurate frequency information, and (3) We introduce a bag of tricks that boosts the generation quality of the proposed model. In our experiments, FreGrad achieves 3.7 times faster training time and 2.2 times faster inference speed compared to our baseline while reducing the model size by 0.6 times (only 1.78M parameters) without sacrificing the output quality. Audio samples are available at: https://mm.kaist.ac.kr/projects/FreGrad.