TimeBlind is a diagnostic benchmark designed to evaluate fine‑grained spatio‑temporal compositionality in video large language models (LLMs). It categorizes temporal understanding into three levels—atomic event recognition, event property characterization, and reasoning about event interdependencies—and uses a minimal‑pairs paradigm where video pairs share identical static content but differ only in temporal structure. Across 20 state‑of‑the‑art MLLMs tested on 600 curated instances, the best model achieved only 48.2% instance accuracy, far below human performance of 98.2%, highlighting a reliance on static visual shortcuts rather than true temporal reasoning.
By Baiqi Li, Kangyi Zhao, Ce Zhang, Chancharik Mitra, Jean de Dieu Nyandwi, Gedas Bertasius
arXiv:2606. 02522v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress on general and long-form video understanding, yet their ability to preserve brief answer-critical visual evidence remains underexplored.
By Xiaolin Liu, Yilun Zhu, Xiangyu Zhao, Xuehui Wang, Yan Li, Xin Li, Haoyu Cao, Xing Sun, Shaofeng Zhang, Xu Yang, Zhihang Zhong, Xue Yang
TempCloze is a video cloze benchmark designed to evaluate visual temporal reasoning in Video-LLMs. The task presents a video’s beginning and ending clips and asks models to select the correct missing middle from four candidates, focusing on semantic, alignment, and progression aspects while minimizing appearance cues. Evaluation of 31 models shows that temporal alignment is the main challenge, with models performing better on semantic content and event progression but struggling to place events correctly in time.
By Wenqi Pei, Henry Hengyuan Zhao, Yilai Liu, Jiahao Meng, Han Chen, Ziyu Wang, Hongyang Du
arXiv:2608. 13113v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have led to substantial progress in video understanding, accompanied by a growing number of long video benchmarks.
By Weitao Chen, Hu Jiaxin, Xie Tianyidan, Yang Li, Yuyi Qian, Banghao Xu, Ziheng Tang, Shenyi Wang, Mingyue Yu, Duo Li, Jiacheng Shi, Gao Wang, Zhan Xu, Zhicheng Qiu, Xuanfu Li, Jian Yang, Lanjun Wang, Zili Yi
The paper tackles the challenge of predicting student engagement from online tutoring videos, noting that engagement is a complex, multidimensional construct influenced by behavioral, emotional, and cognitive states. By analyzing the CASED dataset, the authors highlight the difficulty posed by high inter‑person variability and subjective annotations. They propose a multimodal framework that fuses implicit spatiotemporal features from pretrained video, audio, and image encoders with structured behavioral cues such as head pose, gaze, facial action units, emotion, and wavelet‑based audio features, integrating them via a Perceiver IO bottleneck and modeling participant personalities with variational posteriors. The system employs evidential regression and spectral‑normalized Gaussian process classification heads to provide uncertainty‑aware predictions, achieving competitive performance on the CASED challenge test set while offering well‑calibrated uncertainty metrics.
By Alperen Kantarci, Visvanathan Ramesh, Gemma Roig
arXiv:2609.38377v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Evaluating the physical consistency of generated videos remains a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches rely on off-the-shelf vision-language mode...
By Max Ku, Jiaojiao Fan, Zekun Hao, Francesco Ferroni, Heng Wang, Wenhu Chen, Ming-Yu Liu, Prithvijit Chattopadhyay
Video provides a rich record of human behavior, interaction, and situated contexts, offering important evidence for understanding people and conducting human-centered research. As vision-language mode...
The paper investigates when vision‑language models (VLMs) can independently analyze human‑centered video and when human oversight is still needed. By reviewing 1,702 CHI 2026 papers, the authors develop a five‑dimensional taxonomy of video annotation tasks and build a benchmark of 15 representative tasks. Experiments show that VLMs alone achieve near‑human accuracy (HNS = 97.0), while human verification of VLM outputs yields the highest accuracy (HNS = 121.5) and significantly reduces annotation time and cost.
By Xiyuan Shen, Jiuyang Lyu, Seokhyun Hwang, Huanfen Yao, Shwetak Patel, Zhihan Zhang, Jacob O. Wobbrock
arXiv:2606. 07433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video understanding is being rapidly transformed by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as research moves from short clips to long, multimodal, and knowledge-intensive video scenarios.
By Jiahao Meng, Yue Tan, Qi Xu, Kuan Gao, Weisong Liu, Yanwei Li, Jason Li, Lingdong Kong, Haochen Wang, Qianyu Zhou, Jiangning Zhang, Guangliang Cheng, Yunhai Tong, Lu Qi, Minghsuan Yang
arXiv:2606. 07541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance on objective tasks such as video understanding and reasoning.
By Prabal Shrestha, Bohan Jiang, Haoning Xue, Huan Liu, Xinyi Zhou
WorldReward introduces a vision‑language model–based reward system for camera‑conditioned world models, combining action consistency and visual quality evaluation. It processes paired videos by splitting them into action‑aligned chunks, structuring visual evidence, and aggregating decisions through voting. The model is trained on a large, reasoning‑augmented preference dataset and outperforms GPT‑5.5 on a human‑annotated benchmark, improving both action execution and visual quality when applied to RL post‑training.
By Yibin Wang, Zehan Wang, Junshu Tang, Zhimin Li, Yujie Zhou, Jiazi Bu, Pengyang Ling, Feng Han, Zhixiong Zhang, Long Xing, Shengyuan Ding, Ziang Li, Cheng Jin, Yuhang Zang, Jiaqi Wang, Tianyu Pang
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly used for video understanding, yet their reliability under multi-video inputs remains poorly understood. We study positional bias in multi-video summarization, where the quality of a per-video summary can change with the video's input slot even when the underlying content is unchanged.