Kairos is a new video dataset designed for fine-grained video-language modeling, featuring long-duration videos from ten minutes to half an hour. Each video is annotated with time-resolved labels that capture ongoing actions, entity appearances, attributes, interactions, and evolving contextual cues throughout the timeline. The dataset supports fine-grained evaluation, long-range modeling, reasoning, instruction data construction, representation learning, and video generation.
By Ruibo Ming, Lei Sun, Deheng Zhang, He Zhang, Jialu Li, Jian Wang, Zhendong Li, Mengshun Hu, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Jinjin Gu
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
The paper introduces STITCH, a training‑free method that partitions videos into semantically meaningful temporal chunks using a frozen video‑text backbone. By detecting changes in the embedding sequence of short video windows, STITCH produces reusable temporal abstractions that can be applied to multiple tasks such as event boundary detection, language‑based moment retrieval, and frame selection for vision‑language models. Experiments show that STITCH performs competitively with specialized methods while requiring no task‑specific training, especially when processing is limited to a few frames or tokens.
By Etienne Casanova, Sevan Brodjian, Pietro Perona
The paper introduces structured video prompting, a training‑free inference‑time technique that augments input videos with lightweight spatial and temporal structure to provide explicit anchors for evidence organization. By applying this method to two video benchmarks and two open video‑language models, the authors demonstrate performance improvements across several tasks, with gains varying by model and task. The study suggests that failures in video‑language models stem not only from reasoning capacity but also from how video evidence is presented during inference.
By Sadegh Mohammadian
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.
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
Event-Causal RAG (EC‑RAG) is a lightweight retrieval‑augmented framework designed for reasoning over ultra‑long and streaming videos. It segments video streams into semantically complete events using a dual visual‑audio sentinel mechanism, representing each event as a State‑Event‑State (SES) structure that captures pre‑event, event, and post‑event states. During question answering, bidirectional graph retrieval accesses relevant predecessor and successor events from a dual vector‑graph memory, and answers are generated using both this structured memory and the corresponding video evidence. The authors also introduce ECV‑1H, an hour‑scale long‑video QA benchmark with over 150 hours of untrimmed video and 1,251 human‑annotated QA pairs, where EC‑RAG achieves significant accuracy gains across multiple video foundation models while maintaining efficient streaming memory usage on a single RTX 5090 GPU.
By Peizheng Yan, Yu Zhao, Liang Xie, Juntong Qi, Mingming Wang, Erwei Yin
arXiv:2608.21030v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Video multimodal large language models have advanced significantly, yet fine-grained motion-temporal understanding remains fragile. The core bottlene...
By Chenghua Zhu, Zhaolu Kang, Qifan Shi, Siyan Wu, Kehan Jiang, Lei Wei, Lianyu Hu, Guangyuan Dong, Mingbo Yang, Rui Lu, Guibo Luo
arXiv:2608.29958v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long videos contain far more visual content than Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can process under a fixed visual-token budget, making frame selec...
By Shanqing Xu, Meng Luo, Mengchen Qian, Yuhui Gao, Siyue Peng, Xiaohan Zhong, Xiaojin Zhang, Zhongyu Wei, Wei Chen, Xiang Bai
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
arXiv:2606. 06853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The new era has witnessed a remarkable capability to extend Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for tackling tasks of video understanding.
By Yifan Xu, Chao Zhang, Ruifei Ma, Fei Gao, Zhifei Yang, Jiaxing Qi, Zhipeng Chen
TAME is a CLIP‑based framework for Text‑Video Retrieval that incorporates temporal modeling through three key innovations: sparse Mixture‑of‑Experts layers with frame‑consistent routing, Frame‑Temporal tokens that aggregate cross‑frame information, and a Cross‑Temporal Interaction and Aggregation module for refining frame‑wise similarities. These components enable the model to capture both local visual patterns and long‑range temporal dependencies, leading to consistent performance gains over CLIP‑based baselines on multiple TVR benchmarks, including a 4.0 R@1 improvement on MSR‑VTT. The code is publicly available on GitHub.
By Uicheol Jung, Juyoung Hong, Hojung Kwon, Yukyung Choi