arXiv Machine Learning

Coupled Scene Graph Anticipation: When With-Constraint Recall Hides Structural Inconsistency

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

Algebraic Consistency Alone Does Not Certify Temporal Structure in Latent Action Models

The paper examines latent action models that encode transitions between video frames using algebraic constraints such as additive composition and antisymmetric reversal. It demonstrates that these algebraic consistency conditions do not reliably certify temporal structure, as unconstrained models can achieve similar error reductions and constrained models still outperform unconstrained ones even after temporal pairings are destroyed. The authors find that preserving temporal pairing offers no consistent advantage on downstream tasks and that a direct repair objective yields only marginal improvement, recommending a more rigorous validation protocol.

By Di Wen, Ruodi Zhang, Kailun Yang, Kunyu Peng
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

DoublesEval: Diagnosing Multi-Agent Tactical Reasoning in Vision-Language Models via Professional Doubles Badminton

The paper introduces DoublesEval, a diagnostic framework that uses professional doubles badminton to test visual‑language models’ ability to reason about dynamic multi‑agent interactions. It decomposes rallies into key moments and evaluates models across four dimensions—atomic recognition, intra‑segment composite understanding, cross‑segment causal reasoning, and high‑level tactical abstraction—highlighting specific reasoning failures. The authors also propose TacticCheck, a lightweight consistency checker that improves performance without retraining the models, yet significant gaps remain in tactical reasoning.

By Jintao Cheng, Weibin Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

STRAND: Benchmarking and Improving Object-Centric Spatio-Temporal Monitoring in Video Large Language Models

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 23

What Do Verifiable Rewards Teach Video-Language Models About Time? A Controlled Multi-Model Study

The paper investigates how reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) affects video‑language models’ understanding of time. Four open models were fine‑tuned under different data recipes—verified synthetic questions, unverified self‑supervised tasks, a 1:1 mix, and a verified+real mix—and evaluated on in‑domain and out‑of‑domain real‑video benchmarks with frames ordered, shuffled, or absent. Results show that verified training boosts in‑domain accuracy, largely through non‑visual gains, but can severely harm out‑of‑domain performance unless real verified data is added; moreover, no recipe induces genuine temporal‑order grounding, indicating that verifiable rewards improve benchmark scores without teaching temporal understanding.

By Avyay Sadhu, Patrick Cooper
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Faithful Action-unit Causal Reasoning for Counterfactually Faithful Emotion Explanations

arXiv:2606. 15779v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal models can name the action units (AUs) behind a facial emotion, but their AU->emotion rationales are typically plausible rather than faithful: nothing forces the AUs a model invokes to be the AUs that actually drive its prediction.

By Van Thong Huynh, Hong Hai Nguyen, Thuy Pham, Trong Nghia Nguyen, Soo-Hyung Kim