arXiv Machine Learning By Lucia Cascone, Valeria Fraenza, Michele Nappi, Fabio Narducci, Benedetto Simone

What Did the MLLM Hear? Token-Level Spectro-Temporal Grounding for Audio MLLM Explainability

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The paper introduces STAG, a post‑hoc framework that provides token‑level spectro‑temporal grounding for captions produced by audio‑based multimodal large language models (MLLMs). STAG estimates temporal support for each token via vocabulary projections of encoded audio, measures frequency‑band relevance through controlled spectral occlusion, and fuses these signals into a spectro‑temporal relevance map. Evaluations across ten explanation methods and four grounding benchmarks show that STAG achieves superior event‑localization performance on every dataset, and counterfactual deletion experiments confirm that removing the identified evidence selectively reduces model confidence and often eliminates the corresponding event from regenerated captions.

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