arXiv AI

Natural Language Generation from Visual Events: State-of-the-Art and Key Open Questions

The paper reviews recent work on natural language generation from visual events, emphasizing that tasks involving sequences of images or video frames are fundamentally about modeling complex relationships between evolving visual events and the language used to describe them. It surveys five related tasks, examines common modeling and evaluation methods, and highlights shared challenges across these tasks. The authors then outline key open questions and suggest future research directions to address these challenges.

arXiv AI
Jun 6

Seeing Time: Benchmarking Chronological Reasoning and Shortcut Biases in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606. 05702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to interpret complex visual semantics, yet their capacity for chronological reasoning remains under-explored.

By Haoyu Zhou, Qing Qing, Caichong Li, Qixin Zhang, Yongcheng Jing, Ziqi Xu, Juncheng Hu, Xikun Zhang, Renqiang Luo
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 4

Seeing Time: Benchmarking Chronological Reasoning and Shortcut Biases in Vision-Language Models

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to interpret complex visual semantics, yet their capacity for chronological reasoning remains under-explored. In this paper, we introduce a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate how VLMs perceive and reason about chronological information within and across images.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 12

Do You See What You Draw? A Semantic Closed-Loop Framework for Holistic Evaluation of Unified Multimodal Models

As Large Vision-Language Models increasingly aim to integrate visual generation and understanding within a single parameter space, evaluating such structural unification in a cohesive manner remains a critical challenge. Current evaluation protocols predominantly treat generative and discriminative capabilities as separate tasks, leaving a gap in system-level evaluation for unified multimodal models (UMMs).

arXiv AI
Aug 28

Temporally-Grounded Language Generation: Towards Real-Time Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Temporally-Grounded Language Generation (TGLG), a benchmark that tests vision‑language models on their ability to produce semantically accurate and temporally precise utterances in real‑time settings. It identifies perceptual updating and contingency awareness as key capabilities, curates datasets from sports broadcasting and egocentric interactions, and proposes the TRACE metric to jointly evaluate semantic similarity and temporal alignment. The authors also present VLM‑TSI, a model that interleaves visual and linguistic tokens in a time‑synchronized manner, achieving better performance than a strong baseline yet still showing modest overall results, underscoring the challenge of real‑time VLMs.

By Keunwoo Peter Yu, Joyce Chai
arXiv AI
Sep 15

EventVL: Understand Event Streams via Multimodal Large Language Model

EventVL introduces the first generative event-based multimodal large language model (MLLM) designed for explicit semantic understanding of event streams. The framework leverages a newly annotated dataset of nearly 1.4 million event–image/video–text pairs and incorporates an Event Spatiotemporal Representation to capture comprehensive event information, along with Dynamic Semantic Alignment to refine sparse semantic spaces. Experiments demonstrate that EventVL outperforms existing MLLM baselines in event captioning and scene description generation tasks, advancing the field of event vision.

By Pengteng Li, Yunfan Lu, Pinghao Song, Wuyang Li, Huizai Yao, Hui Xiong
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

From Vision to Language: Investigating Causal Information Flow in Multimodal Decision-Making

The study examines how Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) integrate visual evidence into language‑based decisions by applying layer‑wise causal interventions on video‑text attention pathways in a video‑based generative multiple‑choice setting. Findings reveal that visual information is primarily incorporated while processing candidate answer options, with nouns serving as key semantic anchors and verbs becoming important during temporal reasoning. The research also uncovers a distinct pattern in temporal reasoning, indicating that VLMs struggle to reconstruct sequential information across video frames, possibly due to linguistic biases in temporal expressions.

By Davide Testa, Hugh Mee Wong, Alessandro Lenci, Bernardo Magnini, Albert Gatt
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 21

ID-VTG: Image-Disambiguated Video Temporal Grounding

arXiv:2608. 20127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) faces significant challenges when natural language queries must distinguish between multiple events involving visually similar entities, particularly when relying on fine-grained visual attributes that are difficult to describe accurately in words alone.

By Minghang Zheng, Jingli Wei, Hongyi Yang, Yang Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 16

Reasoning with Image Generation

The paper introduces ReImaGin, a method that uses image generation models as a flexible visual reasoning tool for multimodal large language models. Unlike traditional fixed-function vision tools, ReImaGin accepts natural language commands and can perform open-ended visual operations such as removing occlusions or creating floorplans from multiple views. Experiments on six diverse visual reasoning tasks show that ReImaGin outperforms both text-only reasoning and specialist vision-tool baselines, achieving up to a 25% improvement.

By Nishad Singhi, Hector Garcia Rodriguez, Aditya Arora, Marcus Rohrbach, Anna Rohrbach