arXiv Computer Vision

Drop the Details, Get the Gist: Dynamic Conceptual Representation for Video Recognition

The paper introduces a dynamic conceptual representation framework for video recognition, extending Concept Bottleneck Models from static images to procedural videos. It encodes a multi‑step video as a temporal sequence of segment‑level concept score vectors and processes this sequence with a Transformer encoder to predict the video’s class label. Experiments on cooking and household‑activity videos show that coarser‑grained concepts are sufficient for accurate classification, suggesting that fine‑grained textual descriptions may be unnecessary.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

TimeBlind: A Spatio-Temporal Compositionality Benchmark for Video LLMs

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 AI
Aug 24

CFM: Language-aligned Concept Foundation Model for Vision

The paper introduces CFM, a language‑aligned concept foundation model for vision that generates fine‑grained, human‑interpretable concepts with spatial grounding. By pairing CFM with a strong semantic foundation model, it provides explanations for downstream tasks such as classification, segmentation, and captioning. The authors also analyze local co‑occurrence of concepts to define relationships, improving concept naming and yielding richer explanations while maintaining competitive performance.

By Kai Wittenmayer, Sukrut Rao, Amin Parchami-Araghi, Bernt Schiele, Jonas Fischer
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

TEMPURA: Temporal Event Masked Prediction and Understanding for Reasoning in Action

arXiv:2505.01583v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding causal event relationships and achieving fine-grained temporal grounding in videos remain challenging for vision-language models (VLM...

By Jen-Hao Cheng, Yi-Hao Peng, Huapeng Zhou, Vivian Wang, Huayu Wang, Hsiang-Wei Huang, Wenhao Chai, Hou-I Liu, Kuang-Ming Chen, Cheng-Yen Yang, Yi-Ling Chen, Vibhav Vineet, Qin Cai, Jenq-Neng Hwang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Kairos: A Dataset for Fine-Grained Video-Language Modeling over Space, Time, and Dynamics

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Training-Free Temporal Abstraction for General Video Understanding

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 Computer Vision
Aug 27

MObyGaze: a film dataset of multimodal objectification densely annotated by experts

The paper introduces MObyGaze, a dataset of 20 films annotated by experts for multimodal objectification, covering 6072 segments across 43 hours of video. It defines objectification through a structured thesaurus of 5 sub‑constructs and 11 concepts spanning visual, speech, and audio modalities. The authors formulate learning tasks, explore label diversity strategies, and benchmark vision, text, and audio models to demonstrate the task’s feasibility.

By Julie Tores, Elisa Ancarani, Lucile Sassatelli, Hui-Yin Wu, Clement Bergman, Lea Andolfi, Victor Ecrement, Remy Sun, Frederic Precioso, Thierry Devars, Magali Guaresi, Virginie Julliard, Sarah Lecossais
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 23

Learning from Next-Frame Prediction: Towards Unified and Scalable Visual Representation Learning

The paper introduces VANE, a self‑supervised visual pretraining framework that learns from next‑frame prediction in embedding space. It uses a causal encoder to summarize past observations, a state predictor to infer the representation of the entire next frame, and a lightweight generative decoder to reconstruct fine‑grained spatial detail. By applying the same objective to both videos and still images through a local‑to‑global crop sequence, VANE achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on anticipation, recognition, and dense perception benchmarks, notably outperforming V‑JEPA on EPIC‑KITCHENS‑100 action anticipation.

By Yifeng Yao, Jinghan Li, Zhihao Zhang, Yajiao Xiong, Yang Jin, Kun Xu, Huishuai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao