AgentVidBench is a new multi‑hop video question‑answering benchmark designed to evaluate spatial, temporal, and causal reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Unlike existing tests that focus on simple scene queries or global summaries, AgentVidBench includes step‑by‑step solution traces to assess whether agents gather the necessary evidence to justify their answers. Experiments with 12 MLLMs show limited single‑turn performance, but integrating these models into agentic workflows improves both accuracy and trajectory scores, establishing AgentVidBench as a comprehensive testbed for future research on agentic video understanding.
By Seoyeon An, Hyeonseo Jang, Minsu Kim, Chanho Lee, Younghan Park, Kangwook Lee
arXiv:2603.14733v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved strong performance in single-video understanding, yet their ability to reason across multiple videos...
By Yue Zhang, Liqiang Jing, Jia Li, Yapeng Tian, Xinya Du, Yunhui Guo, Vibhav Gogate
arXiv:2606. 07433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video understanding is being rapidly transformed by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as research moves from short clips to long, multimodal, and knowledge-intensive video scenarios.
By Jiahao Meng, Yue Tan, Qi Xu, Kuan Gao, Weisong Liu, Yanwei Li, Jason Li, Lingdong Kong, Haochen Wang, Qianyu Zhou, Jiangning Zhang, Guangliang Cheng, Yunhai Tong, Lu Qi, Minghsuan Yang
STRAND is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models’ ability to track objects, their states, and relationships over time in videos. It evaluates intermediate reasoning by breaking queries into sub‑questions and uses Faithful Accuracy to ensure all parts of an answer are correct. The authors also propose an object‑centric framework that builds structured trajectories and shows reduced hallucinations and better temporal consistency compared to existing models.
By Thong Nguyen, Tri Cao, Khoi Le, Cong-Duy Nguyen, Quynh Vo, See-Kiong Ng, Bryan Hooi Kuen-Yew
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 Clue-OPSD, a clue‑privileged on‑policy self‑distillation framework that improves long‑video understanding by focusing on short, question‑relevant clue intervals rather than the entire video. Experiments on multiple benchmarks and Qwen3.5 model scales show that this approach consistently outperforms standard backbone models and competes strongly with supervised post‑training baselines, all while requiring fewer input frames and no additional inference modules.
By Kaishen Wang, Dongdi Zhao, Yijun Liang, Dingqiang Ye, Ruibo Chen, Heng Huang, Di Fu
arXiv:2607. 11862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) excel in question answering (QA) but largely operate as black boxes, providing textual answers without verifiable visual grounding.
By Shijie Wang, Honglu Zhou, Ziyang Wang, Ran Xu, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, Chen Sun, Juan Carlos Niebles
SYNCR is a synthetic benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models on cross‑video reasoning. It contains 4,000 question‑answer pairs across 4,827 unique videos, covering tasks in temporal alignment, spatial tracking, comparative reasoning, and holistic synthesis. The benchmark reveals a significant performance gap between current models and humans, with models excelling at temporal ordering but struggling with precise physical and spatial reasoning.
By Sara Ghazanfari, Siddharth Garg, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Farshad Khorrami
arXiv:2608. 07417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world video reasoning often involves multimodal, multi-source inputs, whereas existing video reasoning tasks typically assume a simplified video-text setting, limiting identity matching and person-centric reasoning.
By Shibo Gao, Chongxiao Wang, Chenglong Huang, Jie Ma, Haolin Shi, Fei Ding, Jing Li, Qiang Lyu, Yangyang Liu, Yang Liu, Jun Liu, Linlin Huang, Peipei Yang
arXiv:2610.14439v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large multimodal models (LMMs) need to understand how entities move and interact as a scene develops. This requires following the same entities over...
By Chaoyue Li, Shoudong Han, Haoyang Wu, Boxue Yang, Sijia Chen, Yufan Chen, Ruping Zhang
The paper introduces Grounded Human-Attributed Description and Activity Recognition (GHADAR), a task that requires describing the characteristics and activities of every person in a video given their locations. It presents a new dataset derived from AVA-Actions with open‑set captions, a method that constrains cross‑attention masks in vision‑language models to better use grounding information, and a holistic VLM‑based evaluation schema that compares concepts directly between video and predictions. Experiments show the proposed method surpasses state‑of‑the‑art VLMs and highlight limitations of existing evaluation metrics.
By Jay N. Paranjape, Jurijs Nazarovs, Rohan Sarkar, Yue Guo, Lipeng Ke, Sankar Venkataraman, Vishal M. Patel, Nataraj Jammalamadaka
The paper introduces the Very Big Video Reasoning (VBVR) Dataset, a large-scale collection of over one million video clips organized into 200 curated reasoning tasks. It also presents VBVR-Bench, a benchmark framework that uses rule-based, human-aligned scorers for reproducible evaluation of video reasoning models. The authors conduct a large-scale scaling study, noting early signs of emergent generalization to unseen reasoning tasks, and make all resources publicly available.
By Maijunxian Wang, Ruisi Wang, Juyi Lin, Ran Ji, Thadd\"aus Wiedemer, Qingying Gao, Dezhi Luo, Yaoyao Qian, Lianyu Huang, Zelong Hong, Jiahui Ge, Qianli Ma, Hang He, Yifan Zhou, Lingzi Guo, Lantao Mei, Jiachen Li, Hanwen Xing, Tianqi Zhao, Fengyuan Yu, Weihang Xiao, Yizheng Jiao, Jianheng Hou, Danyang Zhang, Pengcheng Xu, Boyang Zhong, Zehong Zhao, Gaoyun Fang, John Kitaoka, Yile Xu, Hua Xu, Kenton Blacutt, Tin Nguyen, Siyuan Song, Haoran Sun, Shaoyue Wen, Linyang He, Runming Wang, Yanzhi Wang, Mengyue Yang, Ziqiao Ma, Rapha\"el Milli\`ere, Freda Shi, Nuno Vasconcelos, Daniel Khashabi, Alan Yuille, Yilun Du, Ziming Liu, Bo Li, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu, Vikash Kumar, Yijiang Li, Lei Yang, Zhongang Cai, Hokin Deng