The paper introduces VT-Contrast, a representation-level temporal counterfactual objective designed to improve temporal understanding in Video Language Models (VideoLMs). By supervising late-layer last-frame video tokens and contrasting order-preserving views with reordered counterfactuals graded by Kendall tau distance, VT-Contrast addresses the mismatch between ordered video input and text-based supervision. The method requires no architectural changes, is compatible with various VideoLM training tasks, and demonstrates improved performance on temporal understanding benchmarks.
By Yumeng Shi, Quanyu Long, Yin Wu, Wenya Wang
The paper introduces STITCH, a training‑free method that partitions videos into semantically meaningful temporal chunks using a frozen video‑text backbone. By detecting changes in the embedding sequence of short video windows, STITCH produces reusable temporal abstractions that can be applied to multiple tasks such as event boundary detection, language‑based moment retrieval, and frame selection for vision‑language models. Experiments show that STITCH performs competitively with specialized methods while requiring no task‑specific training, especially when processing is limited to a few frames or tokens.
By Etienne Casanova, Sevan Brodjian, Pietro Perona
arXiv:2604. 10024v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long video summarization presents significant challenges for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly in maintaining temporal fidelity over extended durations and producing summaries that are both semantically and temporally grounded.
By Alkesh Patel, Melis Ozyildirim, Ying-Chang Cheng, Ganesh Nagarajan
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
Video-text models adapted from image-text architectures (e.g., CLIP) frequently exhibit temporal blindness, the inability to perceive fundamental cues like order, direction, and motion dynamics. Stand...
arXiv:2605. 23045v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Video representation learning has seen tremendous progress in recent years.
By Mantas Skackauskas, Xinyue Hao, Laura Sevilla-Lara