Q-TriM: Question-Guided Tri-Modal Attention for Audio-Visual Question Answering

Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) extends classical VQA by requiring joint reasoning over video and synchronized audio. However, many AVQA systems rely on deeply stacked layers of self- and cross attention across text, video, and audio. Such sequential stacking may incur loss of information such as subtle inter-modal cues over the layers, causing errors to accumulate across sequential attention layers during the fusion. We introduce Q-TriM which performs multi-modal fusion in a shallow and parallel manner instead of a deep and sequential manner. For Q-TriM, we propose a novel framework for attention operation incorporating video and audio conditioned on text. As a result, we obtain not only standard cross attention outputs but also Tri-Modal Attention representations in which Query, Key, and Value come from distinct modalities. These attention representations are combined in parallel at a single stage, thus avoiding the multi-modal fusion with deep stacks in order to mitigate error accumulation and depth-induced issues. Q-TriM achieves state-of-the-art performance on three AVQA benchmarks, including substantial gains on MUSIC-AVQA-R, which demonstrates its robustness and out-of-distribution generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/Sunghun95/Q-TriM