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
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
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
StateTrace introduces an object‑centric framework that equips Video Language Models with a spatiotemporal state memory, enabling explicit reasoning about objects that become invisible in long videos. By organizing trajectories, inter‑object relations, and state‑transition events, the system retrieves relevant state‑evolution paths and converts them into concise reasoning cues. Experiments show that StateTrace consistently boosts performance on public benchmarks and the newly proposed HSR‑Bench, raising VideoLLaMA3’s score from 39.6 to 64.2.
The paper introduces structured video prompting, a training‑free inference‑time technique that augments input videos with lightweight spatial and temporal structure to provide explicit anchors for evidence organization. By applying this method to two video benchmarks and two open video‑language models, the authors demonstrate performance improvements across several tasks, with gains varying by model and task. The study suggests that failures in video‑language models stem not only from reasoning capacity but also from how video evidence is presented during inference.
By Sadegh Mohammadian
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:2601. 06550v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Semantic Multi-Object Tracking (SMOT) is evolving from purely geometric localization toward comprehensive video understanding.
By Pan Liao, Feng Yang, Di Wu, Jinwen Yu, Wang Zhao, Dingwen Zhang
arXiv:2512. 10359v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video Question Answering (VideoQA) task serves as a critical playground for evaluating whether foundation models can effectively perceive, understand, and reason about dynamic real-world scenarios.
By Sunqi Fan, Jiashuo Cui, Meng-Hao Guo, Shuojin Yang
The paper introduces a progressive training strategy for embodied vision‑language models aimed at reducing spatio‑temporal hallucinations. It first creates a Chain‑of‑Thought dataset that breaks complex reasoning into detailed spatiotemporal steps, then uses supervised pre‑training on this dataset followed by fine‑tuning with weakly‑labeled data. Experiments show the method improves backbone accuracy and narrows the forward‑backward performance gap from over 70% to 6.53%, indicating stronger dynamic reasoning and fewer temporal biases.
By Xiaoda Yang, Shuai Yang, Can Wang, Jingyang Xue, Menglan Tang, Checheng Yu, Xunzhe Zhou, Sashuai Zhou, Tao Jin, Lixin Yang, Xiangyu Yue, Zhou Zhao
arXiv:2606. 05702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.
By Haoyu Zhou, Qing Qing, Caichong Li, Qixin Zhang, Yongcheng Jing, Ziqi Xu, Juncheng Hu, Xikun Zhang, Renqiang Luo
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong progress in video understanding, yet it remains challenging because the token limitation makes MLLMs difficult to capture temporally sparse evidence. Existing methods typically rely on uniform sampling, or frame selection, but these strategies usually optimize either broad temporal coverage or local relevance, making it difficult to preserve both global storyline context and fine-grained evidence.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse expert-level tasks, but they still struggle with fundamental abilities that humans naturally develop through continuous observation of the real world, such as spatial perception and dynamic reasoning. Recent studies have recognized this gap and introduced dedicated benchmarks to evaluate the spatial-temporal capabilities of MLLMs.