Embodied intelligence and world models require video understanding systems to go beyond recognizing objects and actions and develop an understanding of physical regularities. However, despite their strong performance on general video understanding tasks, current video-language models still struggle to reliably determine whether an observed event conforms to specific physical laws.
Video generation models are increasingly capable of producing realistic videos, but they still struggle to generate videos that follow basic physical laws. Compounding this is a lack of reliable granular evaluation methods for localizing and specifying physical law violations in videos.
arXiv:2607. 10190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on video understanding and visual question answering, yet they remain unreliable in reasoning about physical plausibility, where understanding object interactions, causal dynamics, and fundamental physical principles is essential.
By Wenyuan Wang, Lianyu Hu, Hao Wang, Yang Liu
arXiv:2606. 18586v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical events are not understood by their names alone, but by the causal state changes that compose them.
By Shang Wu, Haoran Lu, Songling Liu, Chenwei Xu, Lie Lu, Pranav Maneriker, Fan Du, Manling Li, Zhaoran Wang, Han Liu
arXiv:2607. 02551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video multimodal large language models have made strong progress on open-ended video understanding, but they still lack precise local spatiotemporal perception.
By Yankai Yang, Yancheng Long, Bin Wen, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Han Li, Shuo Yang
arXiv:2607. 11862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) excel in question answering (QA) but largely operate as black boxes, providing textual answers without verifiable visual grounding.
By Shijie Wang, Honglu Zhou, Ziyang Wang, Ran Xu, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, Chen Sun, Juan Carlos Niebles
arXiv:2606. 07433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video understanding is being rapidly transformed by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as research moves from short clips to long, multimodal, and knowledge-intensive video scenarios.
By Jiahao Meng, Yue Tan, Qi Xu, Kuan Gao, Weisong Liu, Yanwei Li, Jason Li, Lingdong Kong, Haochen Wang, Qianyu Zhou, Jiangning Zhang, Guangliang Cheng, Yunhai Tong, Lu Qi, Minghsuan Yang
arXiv:2606. 05966v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding and reasoning about the physical world is the foundation of intelligent behavior, yet state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) still fail at causal physical reasoning, often producing plausible but incorrect answers.
By Tianyi Tang, Zhuoyi Lin, Zeyu Feng, Tianyi Ma, Yew-Soon Ong, Ivor Tsang, Haiyan Yin
arXiv:2509. 12263v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large multimodal models (LMMs) encode physical laws observed during training, such as momentum conservation, as parametric knowledge.
By Gautam Sreekumar, Vishnu Naresh Boddeti
arXiv:2606. 02522v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress on general and long-form video understanding, yet their ability to preserve brief answer-critical visual evidence remains underexplored.
By Xiaolin Liu, Yilun Zhu, Xiangyu Zhao, Xuehui Wang, Yan Li, Xin Li, Haoyu Cao, Xing Sun, Shaofeng Zhang, Xu Yang, Zhihang Zhong, Xue Yang
arXiv:2603. 10652v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In real-world deployment, vision-language models often encounter disturbances such as weather, occlusion, and camera motion.
By Yangfan He, Changgyu Boo, Jaehong Yoon
arXiv:2608. 13167v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When visual evidence is occluded or chaotic, models should abstain.
By Fnu Pramono, John Cai, Sourabh Kulkarni