What Does a Temporal Benchmark Score Measure? Decomposing Channel Use in Video VLM Evaluation
A score on a temporal video question answering benchmark is meant to measure that a model has temporal understanding, but it conflates two questions. 1.
arXiv:2607. 12304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A score on a temporal video question answering benchmark is meant to measure that a model has temporal understanding, but it conflates two questions.
A score on a temporal video question answering benchmark is meant to measure that a model has temporal understanding, but it conflates two questions. 1.
arXiv:2607. 13305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark accuracy in video large language models (LLMs) is often treated as evidence of visual understanding.
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly evaluated on complex image and video understanding tasks, yet conventional metrics primarily assess final-answer quality and reveal little about how diff...
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.
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...
The paper introduces a causal and temporal evaluation framework for vision‑language models (VLMs) that tracks how visual input, question text, and generated prefixes influence autoregressive decoding. It defines three step‑indexed causal‑drive metrics—Visual Causal Drive (VCD), Question Causal Drive (QCD), and Prefix Causal Drive (PCD)—using a Structural Causal Model and interventions. Experiments on Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct and other datasets show a shift from early question and visual guidance to increased reliance on generated prefixes, and demonstrate that QCD and PCD reduce recovery error and improve bias detection.
arXiv:2602.10639v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have achieved strong performance on video understanding tasks, yet existing benchmarks evaluate only what m...
arXiv:2606. 01485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We describe our submission to the VRR Challenge @ CVPR 2026, built on the \emph{ImplicitQA} / \emph{VRR-QA} benchmark~\cite{implicitqa}: multiple-choice video question answering in which answers are deliberately \emph{not} observable in any single frame and must be inferred from spatial layout, motion, depth, viewpoint, causality, and social context across discontinuous frames of creative video.
AVTrace is a diagnostic suite designed to evaluate audio‑visual temporal reasoning in omni models. It covers tasks such as onset and span grounding, synchronization, next‑step prediction, cross‑modal localization, chain parsing, and event‑conditioned comprehension, providing 34,114 training examples and balanced development and test splits. Five open omni models were tested, all scoring below the majority‑label baseline on synchronization verification and showing low performance on chain parsing and event‑conditioned tasks, while parameter‑efficient temporal post‑training improved some metrics.
TRACE (Temporal Audit and Condition-aware Evaluation) is a new benchmark and evaluation framework for streaming video understanding that explicitly records when evidence becomes valid, how visual history is maintained, and how responses are triggered. It combines temporally audited visual tasks, evidence timing, instruction-dependent trigger annotations, a unified causal Core–Adapter protocol, and multidimensional reporting of answer quality, timeliness, response-selection behavior, workload, completion, and reliability. Using 1,240 records from 517 videos, TRACE evaluated eight publicly available models in eight configurations, revealing that similar QA accuracy can hide significant differences in completion, answer validity, generation workload, and proactive performance metrics such as response delay, false alarms, and missed target windows.
arXiv:2610.01595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) receive frames in sequential order and interpret how visual content evolves along the temporal axis, yet temp...
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.