The paper introduces VT-Contrast, a representation-level temporal counterfactual objective designed to improve temporal understanding in Video Language Models (VideoLMs). By supervising late-layer last-frame video tokens and contrasting order-preserving views with reordered counterfactuals graded by Kendall tau distance, VT-Contrast addresses the mismatch between ordered video input and text-based supervision. The method requires no architectural changes, is compatible with various VideoLM training tasks, and demonstrates improved performance on temporal understanding benchmarks.
By Yumeng Shi, Quanyu Long, Yin Wu, Wenya Wang
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
arXiv:2604. 10024v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long video summarization presents significant challenges for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly in maintaining temporal fidelity over extended durations and producing summaries that are both semantically and temporally grounded.
By Alkesh Patel, Melis Ozyildirim, Ying-Chang Cheng, Ganesh Nagarajan
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
Video-text models adapted from image-text architectures (e.g., CLIP) frequently exhibit temporal blindness, the inability to perceive fundamental cues like order, direction, and motion dynamics. Stand...
arXiv:2605. 23045v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Video representation learning has seen tremendous progress in recent years.
By Mantas Skackauskas, Xinyue Hao, Laura Sevilla-Lara
arXiv:2609.00505v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Video-text models adapted from image-text architectures (e.g., CLIP) frequently exhibit temporal blindness, the inability to perceive fundamental cues...
By Sethuraman T V, Savya Khosla, Onkar Kishor Susladkar, Aditi Tiwari, Seoung Wug Oh, Kushal Kafle, Joon-Young Lee, Derek Hoiem, Simon Jenni
arXiv:2601. 14968v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Most existing time series classification methods adopt a discriminative paradigm that maps input sequences directly to one-hot encoded class labels.
By Mingyue Cheng, Xiaoyu Tao, Huajian Zhang, Qi Liu, Zhiding Liu, Yucong Luo, Yiheng Chen, Enhong Chen
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
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
Long-video understanding remains challenging for multimodal large language models, because temporally extended videos often contain thousands of frames and are therefore expensive to process exhaustively. Existing methods usually construct compact visual inputs from long videos under a limited visual budget.
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