arXiv AI

Temporal Specification Guidance for Text-to-Video Generation

The paper introduces Temporal Specification Guidance (TSG), a training‑free inference framework that uses Temporal Logic specifications to guide text‑to‑video generation. TSG evaluates visual concept traces with differentiable quantitative semantics and adjusts the denoising direction via gradient‑derived attention biases, eliminating the need for external classifiers or backpropagation through the transformer. Experiments on 220 prompts across 11 temporal constraint categories show that TSG improves specification satisfaction by 9.5–20 percentage points over classifier‑free guidance with minimal memory overhead.

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 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 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 AI
2d ago

FrameForge: Harnessing Priors of Video Foundation Models for Unified Image Generation

FrameForge introduces a unified image generation framework that leverages pretrained video foundation models to capture dynamic temporal relationships between conditions and targets. It employs a Mixture of Temporal Experts (MoTE) to adaptively select temporal intervals and a Chain of Temporal Reasoning (CoTR) to model transformations through latent intermediate states, guided by a reasoning-bottleneck attention mask. Experiments on DreamBench, COCO2017, and GEdit-Bench demonstrate FrameForge’s superior performance in subject-driven generation, canny-to-image generation, and image editing compared to existing methods.

By Yijing Lin, Zhendong Mao, Mengqi Huang, Yuxin Wang, Yongdong Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 1

Improving Spatial-Temporal Reasoning in Video-Language Models with Structured Video Prompting

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

RT-NeuS: Towards Real-Time Neuro-Symbolic Video Understanding via Adaptive Temporal Verification

RT-NeuS is a neuro‑symbolic framework for long‑form video question answering that retains the accuracy and formal guarantees of temporal‑logic‑guided methods while dramatically reducing inference latency. It achieves this by using coarse‑to‑fine adaptive sampling to focus on query‑relevant frames and batched proposition detection with KV‑cache reuse, enabling all propositions to be evaluated in a single forward pass. Experiments on LongVideoBench, Video‑MME, and MLVU show up to a 13× speed‑up on an NVIDIA H200 GPU while matching or surpassing prior neuro‑symbolic accuracy.

By Shawn Liang, Sahil Shah, Chengwei Zhou, S P Sharan, Harsh Goel, Arnab Sanyal, Sandeep Chinchali, Gourav Datta
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 10

VideoTIR: Accurate Understanding for Long Videos with Efficient Tool-Integrated Reasoning

VideoTIR introduces a reinforcement‑learning approach to improve long‑video understanding by encouraging multimodal large language models to use comprehensive multi‑level toolkits efficiently. It combines Zero‑RL and SFT cold‑starting strategies to help models retrieve and focus on meaningful video segments, images, and regions, thereby reducing hallucinations. The method includes Toolkit Action Grouped Policy Optimization (TAGPO) to streamline tool‑calling and a sandbox‑based trajectory synthesis framework for high‑quality data, achieving strong results on three long‑video QA benchmarks.

By Zhe Gao, Shiyu Shen, Taifeng Chai, Weinong Wang, Haotian Xu, Xing Wu, Wenbin Li, Qi Fan, Yang Gao, Dacheng Tao
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
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