arXiv Computer Vision

Tempo-Zero: Recursive Self-Play in Executable Worlds for Video Reasoning

Tempo‑Zero is a self‑improvement framework for video reasoning that uses recursive self‑play in executable environments. It closes a loop of environment execution, self‑play verification, and environment evolution, allowing a single policy to act as both questioner and solver and to receive execution‑grounded rewards. The approach trains only on simple programs, without external video data or supervised fine‑tuning, and achieves superior performance on twelve real‑world video benchmarks, especially on temporal grounding tasks.

arXiv AI
Aug 21

VISD: Enhancing Video Reasoning via Structured Self-Distillation

arXiv:2605. 06094v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training VideoLLMs for complex reasoning remains challenging due to sparse sequence level rewards and the lack of fine grained credit assignment over long, temporally grounded reasoning trajectories.

By Hao Lin, Kunyang Lv, Xu Jiang, Jingqi Tian, Zhongjing Du, Jiayu Ding, Qiaoman Zhang, Hongbo Jin
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 AI
Aug 25

VisionCoach: Reinforcing Grounded Video Reasoning via Visual-Perception Prompting

VisionCoach is an input‑adaptive reinforcement learning framework that enhances spatio‑temporal grounding in video reasoning by using visual prompting during training. The system selectively applies visual prompts to challenging inputs, amplifying question‑relevant evidence and suppressing distractors, and then internalizes these improvements through self‑distillation so that inference can be performed on raw videos without prompts. Experiments on multiple benchmarks (V‑STAR, VideoMME, World‑Sense, VideoMMMU, PerceptionTest, and Charades‑STA) show that VisionCoach achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance while maintaining a single efficient inference pathway.

By Daeun Lee, Shoubin Yu, Yue Zhang, Mohit Bansal
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

WorldGuide: Goal-Directed Video World Model for Procedural Task Execution

WorldGuide is a closed‑loop video world model that, given an initial image and a task goal, predicts an atomic action, generates the corresponding video clip, and uses that clip to decide the next action or terminate the task. It trains a Planner to predict the next action or completion from visual progress and an Executor to realize those actions, while a hierarchical visual memory tracks state over long horizons. The authors introduce WorldGuide‑Bench, a dataset of ~59K step‑annotated videos across 245 tasks, and show that WorldGuide outperforms the recent MiniMax‑H3 model on both WorldGuide‑Bench and VideoCraft‑Bench, highlighting the benefit of coupling planning with learned execution for goal‑directed procedural video generation.

By Ankan Deria, Komal Kumar, Hisham Cholakkal, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman Khan
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Beyond Scalar IoU: Structured Verification from Rollout Groups for Video Temporal Grounding

The paper introduces SUTURE, a structured verification method for video temporal grounding that leverages the joint structure of rollout groups rather than scoring each rollout independently. SUTURE conditions verification on the entire rollout group, using disagreement across rollouts to reweight targets and coverage at each position to redistribute reward mass. Experiments on five benchmarks show that SUTURE consistently improves grounding performance across all IoU thresholds and reduces video-start anchoring in reasoning traces, indicating that the joint structure of a rollout group can provide a more informative temporal verifier.

By Youngjae Cho, Won Young Jhoo, Jongsuk Kim
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

From Evaluation to Enhancement: Benchmarking and Improving Think-with-Video Reasoning for Video Generative Models

The paper introduces VWG-Bench, a benchmark covering nine reasoning dimensions and 38 tasks to evaluate video generative models on symbolic reasoning, physical laws, and goal pursuit. It also presents Vid-PRE, a prompt-rewriting framework that offloads reasoning to a VLM, improving logical performance without changing the generator architecture. Experiments show that current models excel at visual quality but struggle with logic-heavy tasks, while Vid-PRE significantly boosts reasoning across multiple generators.

By Meng Luo, Yicheng Liu, Jiahao Wang, Yuanxing Zhang, Xin Tao, Pengfei Wan, Kun Gai, Hao Fei
arXiv AI
Aug 11

SCOUT: Self-Checking and Recovery-Aware Tool-Thought Agents for Ultra-Long Egocentric Video Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 07959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultra-long egocentric video understanding requires reasoning over temporally sparse evidence distributed across hours or days, challenging current multimodal models with limited context and the grounding of key video segments.

By Keyang Zhong, Kuo Wang, Peng Liu, Quanlong Zheng, Junlin Xie, Zhijia Liang, Yanhao Zhang, Guanbin Li