Two Causally Related Needles in a Video Haystack

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Li, Miaoyu, Chao, Qin, Li, Boyang
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Li, Miaoyu
Chao, Qin
Li, Boyang
author_facet Li, Miaoyu
Chao, Qin
Li, Boyang
contents Properly evaluating the ability of Video-Language Models (VLMs) to understand long videos remains a challenge. We propose a long-context video understanding benchmark, Causal2Needles, that assesses two crucial abilities insufficiently addressed by existing benchmarks: (1) extracting information from two separate locations (two needles) in a long video and understanding them jointly, and (2) modeling the world in terms of cause and effect in human behaviors. Causal2Needles evaluates these abilities using noncausal one-needle, causal one-needle, and causal two-needle questions. The most complex question type, causal two-needle questions, require extracting information from both the cause and effect events from a long video and the associated narration text. To prevent textual bias, we introduce two complementary question formats: locating the video clip containing the answer, and verbal description of a visual detail from that video clip. Our experiments reveal that models excelling on existing benchmarks struggle with causal 2-needle questions, and the model performance is negatively correlated with the distance between the two needles. These findings highlight critical limitations in current VLMs. The dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/causal2needles/Causal2Needles
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_19853
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Two Causally Related Needles in a Video Haystack
Li, Miaoyu
Chao, Qin
Li, Boyang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Properly evaluating the ability of Video-Language Models (VLMs) to understand long videos remains a challenge. We propose a long-context video understanding benchmark, Causal2Needles, that assesses two crucial abilities insufficiently addressed by existing benchmarks: (1) extracting information from two separate locations (two needles) in a long video and understanding them jointly, and (2) modeling the world in terms of cause and effect in human behaviors. Causal2Needles evaluates these abilities using noncausal one-needle, causal one-needle, and causal two-needle questions. The most complex question type, causal two-needle questions, require extracting information from both the cause and effect events from a long video and the associated narration text. To prevent textual bias, we introduce two complementary question formats: locating the video clip containing the answer, and verbal description of a visual detail from that video clip. Our experiments reveal that models excelling on existing benchmarks struggle with causal 2-needle questions, and the model performance is negatively correlated with the distance between the two needles. These findings highlight critical limitations in current VLMs. The dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/causal2needles/Causal2Needles
title Two Causally Related Needles in a Video Haystack
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19853