CAD: Conflict-Aware Decoding to Mitigate Cross-Modal Hallucinations in Omnimodal Large Language Models

Omnimodal large language models (Omni-LLMs) integrate audio, video, and text, yet remain vulnerable to cross-modal hallucinations, where one modality improperly influences predictions about another. Existing training-free decoders modulate modality influence through perturbation or relevance weighting, but do not assess predictive compatibility within the joint audio-visual branch. Because joint-branch discrepancies may indicate either harmful interference or useful complementarity, reliable intervention requires assessing both discrepancy magnitude and actionability. To this end, we propose Conflict-Aware Decoding (CAD), a training-free framework comprising Potential Conflict Magnitude Estimation (PCME) and Conflict Actionability Assessment (CAA). PCME quantifies potential conflict using audio-video disagreement and the deviation of the joint prediction from a relevance-weighted unimodal reference. CAA then applies Dempster-Shafer reliability discounting to task-space answer relations, using query relevance and answer decisiveness to determine whether intervention is warranted. When an actionable conflict is identified, CAD selectively reallocates decoding weight from the joint branch to the unimodal branches. Experiments on CMM, AVHBench, WorldSense, and VideoMME show that CAD consistently outperforms the base decoder and competitive training-free methods across multiple audio-visual backbones. On Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, CAD improves overall accuracy by 14.1 and 8.0 percentage points on CMM and AVHBench, respectively, without model retraining.