arXiv AI

EventCoT: Event-centric Video Chain-of-thought for Reasoning Temporal Localization

arXiv:2607. 04872v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning temporal localization (RTL) requires a model to generate an answer that itself contains the time interval supporting it, so high-level reasoning and precise temporal grounding must be produced jointly in a single response.

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
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
Jul 29

Reasoning with Memory: A Temporal Granularity-Adaptive Framework for Training-Free Long Video Understanding

arXiv:2607. 24794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate superior generalization in fundamental video tasks, restricted context windows limit their long video understanding.

By Linghao Meng, Qiankun Li, Junyuan Mao, Pujin Liao, Zhicheng He, Enbo Zhang, Kun Wang, Yang Liu, Huazhu Fu, Yueming Jin
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Event-Causal RAG: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Long Video Reasoning in Complex Scenarios

Event-Causal RAG (EC‑RAG) is a lightweight retrieval‑augmented framework designed for reasoning over ultra‑long and streaming videos. It segments video streams into semantically complete events using a dual visual‑audio sentinel mechanism, representing each event as a State‑Event‑State (SES) structure that captures pre‑event, event, and post‑event states. During question answering, bidirectional graph retrieval accesses relevant predecessor and successor events from a dual vector‑graph memory, and answers are generated using both this structured memory and the corresponding video evidence. The authors also introduce ECV‑1H, an hour‑scale long‑video QA benchmark with over 150 hours of untrimmed video and 1,251 human‑annotated QA pairs, where EC‑RAG achieves significant accuracy gains across multiple video foundation models while maintaining efficient streaming memory usage on a single RTX 5090 GPU.

By Peizheng Yan, Yu Zhao, Liang Xie, Juntong Qi, Mingming Wang, Erwei Yin
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