In this paper, we introduce Claim-Level Rubric Rewards (CuRe), a structured reward framework designed to address the reward-design bottleneck in reinforcement learning for dense video captioning. Existing reward designs generally fall into two categories: holistic response-level judgment across heterogeneous criteria, or alignment-based evaluation against reference captions.
Video captioning requires fine-grained spatio-temporal understanding of videos, including spatial perception of where objects are located and temporal perception of when events occur. Existing MLLMs usually generate captions directly from video inputs without exposing the perceptual evidence behind descriptions.
PercepCap is a video captioning framework that explicitly models spatio‑temporal perception before generating captions. It follows a perceive‑describe chain, first producing a perception trace of object trajectories and temporal events, then generating the final caption conditioned on that trace. The method uses a two‑stage training strategy—supervised fine‑tuning followed by perception‑grounded reinforcement learning—and builds caption‑aligned perception data to ensure the perception trace and caption refer to the same objects and events.
By Yifan Xu, Zihao Wang, Zhixiao Wang, Jiaming Zhang, Yichun Yang, Desen Meng, Yuanxing Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Limin Wang
arXiv:2610.16172v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong results on video question answering, yet often fail to recover the temporal structure...
By Guowen Zhang, Boshen Xu, Zihao Yue, Ziheng Wang, Xiaokun Liu, Xin Tao, Wenyu Qin, Pengfei Wan, Qin Jin
arXiv:2606. 24636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cinematographic captioning aims to describe how a video is filmed using professional film-language concepts such as camera movement, shot size, depth of field, composition, and shooting angle.
By Xinyu Mao, Yuhui Zeng, Xiaokun Liu, Wenyu Qin, Meng Wang, Xin Tao, Pengfei Wan, Xiaohan Xing, Max Meng
VidOmni-Bench is a new benchmark for fine‑grained video understanding that asks models to verify whether each event in dense video captions is supported by the video. It contains 500 videos covering five complexity types and durations from 4 seconds to 90 minutes, and uses human‑verified sentence‑level labels to create hard negatives. Experiments show that Video‑LLMs often hallucinate events, struggle to detect incorrect descriptions, and exhibit varying weaknesses depending on video complexity and duration.
By Changbeen Kim, Junwon Chang, Kipyo Kim, Risa Shinoda, Kuniaki Saito, Donghyun Kim
The paper introduces OACap, a caption-guided active observation system for detailed video captioning that requests targeted observations to fill missing information and iteratively refines its captions. OACap consistently improves performance on general video-understanding benchmarks while using only a text‑only reader. The authors also present FSCap‑Bench, a new evaluation suite with Core‑Support Factuality Score and Cross‑Modal Semantic Round‑Trip Score to assess factual and semantic preservation in captions.
By Hao Shi, Hong Yan, Xiaoyang Zhang, Qing Cui, Chao Huang
arXiv:2605.07872v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Multimodal reward models have advanced substantially in text and image domains, yet progress in video understanding reward modeling remains s...
By Yuancheng Wei, Linli Yao, Lei Li, Haojie Zhang, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Xu Sun
arXiv:2609.00591v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: An image may be worth a thousand words, but most captioning models describe it in only a few. Modern vision-language models produce fluent high-level c...
By Suryaansh Jain, Rahasya Barkur, Vishal G, Ryan Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Jack Wang, Koustava Goswami, Nedim Lipka, Puneet Mathur, Samyadeep Basu, Seunghyun Yoon
arXiv:2606. 06294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Temporal Grounding (TG) aims to localize video segments corresponding to a textual query.
By Qi Xu, Yue Tan, Shihao Chen, Jiahao Meng, Anna Wang, Shunping Ji, Hao Fei, Jason Li
arXiv:2609.22947v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is vital for optimizing video generation models, with a robust reward model (RM) serving as the cornerstone. However, exist...
By Zhenchen Tang, Yang Li, Songlin Yang, Bo Peng, Xiaotong Zhao, Shuai Li, Haotian Fan, Alan Zhao, Jing Dong
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