arXiv Machine Learning

TempCore: Are Video QA Benchmarks Temporally Grounded?

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

Stress Tests REVEAL Fragile Temporal and Visual Grounding in Video-Language Models

The paper introduces REVEAL, a diagnostic benchmark that stresses Video‑Language Models (VidLMs) on five controlled probes—camera‑motion sensitivity, cross‑frame integration, video sycophancy, language‑only shortcuts, and temporal expectation bias—to assess how well these models encode and use visual evidence. Experiments on 12 VidLMs reveal systematic failures: some visual signals are never reliably encoded, while others are overridden by model priors, leading to performance below chance on several probes that humans solve with high accuracy. Mechanistic probes further pinpoint where and why visual evidence is lost, demonstrating that under assertive prompts a model’s output becomes nearly invariant to real versus random video input, rendering visual evidence causally inert.

By Sethuraman T V, Savya Khosla, Aditi Tiwari, Vidya Ganesh, Rakshana Jayaprakash, Aditya Jain, Vignesh Srinivasakumar, Onkar Kishor Susladkar, Srinidhi Sunkara, Aditya Shanmugham, Rakesh Vaideeswaran, Abbaas Alif Mohamed Nishar, Simon Jenni, Rohan Maheshwari, Derek Hoiem
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

The Shape of Time: Video-Token Contrast for Temporal Understanding in VideoLMs

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
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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

ReQuest: Rethinking-based Question-Aware Frame Selection for Long-Form Video QA

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have substantially advanced video understanding, yet long-form video QA remains challenging under fixed input token budgets, where uniform sampling can be inefficient for evidence localization. We propose ReQuest , an uncertainty-driven, question-adaptive keyframe selection pipeline that aligns question intent with relevant video content through selective computation.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

TempCloze: Can Video-LLMs Identify the Missing Middle?

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 Machine Learning
Jun 2

Perception First: A Frontier Native-Video Model with Self-Consistency for Implicit Video Question Answering

arXiv:2606. 01485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We describe our submission to the VRR Challenge @ CVPR 2026, built on the \emph{ImplicitQA} / \emph{VRR-QA} benchmark~\cite{implicitqa}: multiple-choice video question answering in which answers are deliberately \emph{not} observable in any single frame and must be inferred from spatial layout, motion, depth, viewpoint, causality, and social context across discontinuous frames of creative video.

By Ali Alavi