Intervention, Not Shared Latents: Blocking Visual Shortcuts in Audio-Video Generation

Abstract

Joint audio--video (AV) generators are trained on data in which \emph{what an event looks like} and \emph{what it sounds like} are spuriously correlated. We present a \emph{controlled causal study} of the resulting failure mode. In an AV structural causal model where the audio is, by construction, independent of the video's nuisance appearance, models that let audio read video directly---through cross-attention or a shared latent---learn a \emph{visual shortcut}: they predict sound from appearance rather than the causal event and, when the appearance--event correlation is broken at test time, synthesize the wrong event's sound. Crucially, the popular remedy of routing both modalities through a \emph{shared common-cause latent} does \emph{not} fix this---a bottleneck, an unsupervised shared/private factorization, and a faithful shared-prior model all grab the appearance proxy and fail like the direct model. Blocking the shortcut instead requires an \emph{intervention on the nuisance}: under the stated assumptions we prove that counterfactual invariance is necessary and sufficient to identify the causal predictor, and we verify the mechanism from feature-vector SCMs to procedural pixel video, real images with spectrogram audio, moving real digits, and a conditional generator. On a \emph{real, pretrained} V2A generator (MMAudio), an input-intervention test shows the model is far from invariant to sound-irrelevant edits, though a generic-noise control reveals it is broadly input-brittle rather than specifically colour-shortcutting---clean isolation of the shortcut needs the controlled confounds our synthetic studies provide. We characterize \emph{when} the shortcut occurs, compare the objective against supervised counterfactual augmentation, and isolate the \emph{unknown-nuisance} regime---where the intervention cannot be applied---as the central open problem.