arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

TEMPURA: Temporal Event Masked Prediction and Understanding for Reasoning in Action

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 AI
Oct 2

Before It Fades: Reinforcing Temporal Representations at Inference Time in VideoLLMs

The paper introduces Temporal Activation Injection (TAI), a post‑processing technique that reinforces temporal representations in Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) at inference time. By measuring the temporal divergence vector τ_l— the layer‑wise difference caused by reversing video frame order— the authors find that temporal information peaks at intermediate layers and fades toward the output. TAI injects the peak divergence back into later layers, improving temporal reasoning on three VideoLLMs across four benchmarks without affecting non‑temporal performance.

By Youngwoo Shin, Yusung Ro, Minseo Kim, Junmo Kim
arXiv AI
Sep 10

TimeBlind: A Spatio-Temporal Compositionality Benchmark for Video LLMs

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 Machine Learning
Aug 24

COMET: Contrastive Motion-Enhanced Temporal Reasoning for Video Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2608.21030v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video multimodal large language models have advanced significantly, yet fine-grained motion-temporal understanding remains fragile. The core bottlene...

By Chenghua Zhu, Zhaolu Kang, Qifan Shi, Siyan Wu, Kehan Jiang, Lei Wei, Lianyu Hu, Guangyuan Dong, Mingbo Yang, Rui Lu, Guibo Luo