Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to interpret complex visual semantics, yet their capacity for chronological reasoning remains under-explored. In this paper, we introduce a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate how VLMs perceive and reason about chronological information within and across images.
As generative multimedia evolves from static image synthesis to complex, interleaved visual narratives, a foundational bottleneck has emerged: the judgment crisis. While human perception naturally synthesizes the temporal and logical flow of a story, automated evaluation systems remain largely "blind" to sequential continuity, often failing to distinguish between a coherent narrative and a semantically shuffled or contradictory sequence.
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
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
arXiv:2605. 18160v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, primarily attributed to effective paradigms for integrating visual and textual information.
By Xinpeng Dong, Min Zhang, Kairong Han, Xu Tan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
TempCloze is a video cloze benchmark designed to evaluate visual temporal reasoning in Video-LLMs. The task presents a video’s beginning and ending clips and asks models to select the correct missing middle from four candidates, focusing on semantic, alignment, and progression aspects while minimizing appearance cues. Evaluation of 31 models shows that temporal alignment is the main challenge, with models performing better on semantic content and event progression but struggling to place events correctly in time.
By Wenqi Pei, Henry Hengyuan Zhao, Yilai Liu, Jiahao Meng, Han Chen, Ziyu Wang, Hongyang Du
arXiv:2603. 05997v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Irregularly sampled time series (ISTS) are widespread in real-world scenarios, exhibiting asynchronous observations on uneven time intervals across diverse variables.
By Zhi Lei, Chenxi Liu, Hao Miao, Wanghui Qiu, Bin Yang, Chenjuan Guo
The paper introduces CompareBench, a new benchmark suite for evaluating visual comparison reasoning in vision‑language models. It includes TallyBench for object counting, OmniCaps for captioning and tagging, and a 1,200‑question CompareBench that tests quantity, geometric, spatial, and temporal comparisons. Experiments on nine closed‑source models show strong overall performance but persistent weaknesses in counting, spatial reasoning, geometric comparison, and temporal ordering, highlighting visual comparison as a systematic challenge for current VLMs.
By Jie Cai
The study examines how Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) integrate visual evidence into language‑based decisions by applying layer‑wise causal interventions on video‑text attention pathways in a video‑based generative multiple‑choice setting. Findings reveal that visual information is primarily incorporated while processing candidate answer options, with nouns serving as key semantic anchors and verbs becoming important during temporal reasoning. The research also uncovers a distinct pattern in temporal reasoning, indicating that VLMs struggle to reconstruct sequential information across video frames, possibly due to linguistic biases in temporal expressions.
By Davide Testa, Hugh Mee Wong, Alessandro Lenci, Bernardo Magnini, Albert Gatt
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:2605. 08974v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced video understanding, they remain highly prone to hallucinations in dynamic scenes.
By Tri Cao, Khoi Le, Thong Nguyen, Cong-Duy Nguyen, Quynh Vo, Anh Tuan Luu, Chunyan Miao, See-Kiong Ng, Shuicheng Yan, Bryan Hooi
arXiv:2509. 09151v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Research in video understanding has advanced rapidly, driven by increasingly diverse datasets and more powerful model architectures.
By Lei Wang, Syuan-Hao Li, Piotr Koniusz, Yongsheng Gao