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:2607. 13305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark accuracy in video large language models (LLMs) is often treated as evidence of visual understanding.
By Jae Joong Lee
arXiv:2509.01167v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) can ingest only a limited number of video frames, making frame selection a practical necessity. But do current...
By Hyunjong Ok, Jaeho Lee
arXiv:2609.39563v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Existing video language models encode sampled RGB frames independently, so a long video must either exhaust the token budget or drop the changes betwee...
By Can Zhang, Xiaotian Han, Junyuan Shang, Yuchen Ding, Zhenyu Zhang, Shuohuan Wang, Dianhai Yu, Ruirui Li
arXiv:2608. 06361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world video benchmarks provide broad coverage, but their fixed clips entangle event count, rate, duration, and visual complexity, making failure modes hard to isolate.
By Sarvesh Baskar, Zikui Cai, Shayan Shabihi, Anirudh Satheesh, Muhammad R. Islam, Udari Madhushani Sehwag, Tom Goldstein, Furong Huang
arXiv:2606. 09803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present \textbf{Echo-Memory}, a controlled study of memory mechanisms in action-conditioned world models.
By Wayne King, Zeyue Xue, Yuxuan Bian, Jie Huang, Haoran Li, Yaowei Li, Yaofeng Su, Yuming Li, Haoyu Wang, Shiyi Zhang, Songchun Zhang, Yuwei Niu, Sihan Xu, Junhao Zhuang, Haoyang Huang, Nan Duan
arXiv:2609.34581v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Temporal video grounding is a key capability of advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for the thorough understanding of video events, w...
By Shaobo Ju, Haiyang Yu, Xuecheng Wu, Qiong Wu, Jiacong Wang, Fan Shi, Jun Peng, Yiyi Zhou
Token-Budget Distillation (TBD) is a parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning framework that adapts video vision‑language models to a fixed token budget. It freezes the pretrained backbone, updates only LoRA adapters, and incorporates FlashVID visual token compression. TBD uses a dual‑path teacher‑student design with full‑token supervision and compressed student optimization, enabling the student to recover full‑token semantics while remaining efficient under aggressive token reduction.
By Xiaoyang Guo, Guoping Luo, Jusheng Zhang, Keze Wang, Wenhao Wang
arXiv:2609.37042v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have achieved strong video understanding capabilities but incur substantial inference overhead due to the lar...
By Shuo Yang, Changbai Li, Rui Tang, Xinyu Zhao, Linlin Yang, Baochang Zhang
The paper introduces Event-Driven Refresh + Recurrence Memory (EDRRM) to improve Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS). EDRRM selectively re-invokes the Sa2VA model at stable change points, using an EMA‑smoothed event score from tracking cues and a recurrence memory that retrieves anchor frames via CLIP similarity. Experiments on Ref‑DAVIS17, MeViS, and ReVOS show that EDRRM maintains or surpasses J&F scores while reducing refresh calls and false‑positive failures, with modest overhead compared to Sa2VA inference.
By Abu Hanif Muhammad Syarubany, Jaehyun Jang, Siwoo Lim, Seungyeon Ryu, Chang D. Yoo
arXiv:2606. 02522v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress on general and long-form video understanding, yet their ability to preserve brief answer-critical visual evidence remains underexplored.
By Xiaolin Liu, Yilun Zhu, Xiangyu Zhao, Xuehui Wang, Yan Li, Xin Li, Haoyu Cao, Xing Sun, Shaofeng Zhang, Xu Yang, Zhihang Zhong, Xue Yang
WanPE is a 397‑B parameter prompt‑enhancement model that learns director‑level cinematic planning from 1.05 M real‑world videos. It generates shot‑level cinematic plans through video‑grounded reverse construction and uses Semantic‑Consistency GRPO (SC‑GRPO) to maintain user intent across shots and time. In evaluations, WanPE improves human preference over raw prompts by up to 50.86 points for 30‑second videos and outperforms commercial offerings for shorter durations.
By Yubo Zhu, Yawen Shao, Ziyun Dai, Zixun Fang, Kai Zhu, Siyang Sun, Haolan Xue, Chuxin Wang, Tingyu Weng, Jingming Luo, Chen Shi, Lianghua Huang, Yufeng Ai, Yuzheng Wang, Wenyuan Zhang, Yu Shang, Yuxiang Bao, Zoubin Bi, Jie Xiao, Jinbo Xing, Jiaxing Zhao, Chongyang Zhong, Hengjian Chen, Chenwei Xie, Akide Liu, Zhehan Kan, Yu Liu, Wei Zhai, Sheng Zhong, Wei Tong