Video-Holmes: Can MLLM Think Like Holmes for Complex Video Reasoning?

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cheng, Junhao, Ge, Yuying, Wang, Teng, Ge, Yixiao, Liao, Jing, Shan, Ying
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909625216925696
author Cheng, Junhao
Ge, Yuying
Wang, Teng
Ge, Yixiao
Liao, Jing
Shan, Ying
author_facet Cheng, Junhao
Ge, Yuying
Wang, Teng
Ge, Yixiao
Liao, Jing
Shan, Ying
contents Recent advances in CoT reasoning and RL post-training have been reported to enhance video reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. This progress naturally raises a question: can these models perform complex video reasoning in a manner comparable to human experts? However, existing video benchmarks primarily evaluate visual perception and grounding abilities, with questions that can be answered based on explicit prompts or isolated visual cues. Such benchmarks do not fully capture the intricacies of real-world reasoning, where humans must actively search for, integrate, and analyze multiple clues before reaching a conclusion. To address this issue, we present Video-Holmes, a benchmark inspired by the reasoning process of Sherlock Holmes, designed to evaluate the complex video reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Video-Holmes consists of 1,837 questions derived from 270 manually annotated suspense short films, which spans seven carefully designed tasks. Each task is constructed by first identifying key events and causal relationships within films, and then designing questions that require models to actively locate and connect multiple relevant visual clues scattered across different video segments. Our comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals that, while these models generally excel at visual perception, they encounter substantial difficulties with integrating information and often miss critical clues. For example, the best-performing model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieves an accuracy of only 45%, with most models scoring below 40%. We aim that Video-Holmes can serve as a "Holmes-test" for multimodal reasoning, motivating models to reason more like humans and emphasizing the ongoing challenges in this field. The benchmark is released in https://github.com/TencentARC/Video-Holmes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_21374
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Video-Holmes: Can MLLM Think Like Holmes for Complex Video Reasoning?
Cheng, Junhao
Ge, Yuying
Wang, Teng
Ge, Yixiao
Liao, Jing
Shan, Ying
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent advances in CoT reasoning and RL post-training have been reported to enhance video reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. This progress naturally raises a question: can these models perform complex video reasoning in a manner comparable to human experts? However, existing video benchmarks primarily evaluate visual perception and grounding abilities, with questions that can be answered based on explicit prompts or isolated visual cues. Such benchmarks do not fully capture the intricacies of real-world reasoning, where humans must actively search for, integrate, and analyze multiple clues before reaching a conclusion. To address this issue, we present Video-Holmes, a benchmark inspired by the reasoning process of Sherlock Holmes, designed to evaluate the complex video reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Video-Holmes consists of 1,837 questions derived from 270 manually annotated suspense short films, which spans seven carefully designed tasks. Each task is constructed by first identifying key events and causal relationships within films, and then designing questions that require models to actively locate and connect multiple relevant visual clues scattered across different video segments. Our comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals that, while these models generally excel at visual perception, they encounter substantial difficulties with integrating information and often miss critical clues. For example, the best-performing model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieves an accuracy of only 45%, with most models scoring below 40%. We aim that Video-Holmes can serve as a "Holmes-test" for multimodal reasoning, motivating models to reason more like humans and emphasizing the ongoing challenges in this field. The benchmark is released in https://github.com/TencentARC/Video-Holmes.
title Video-Holmes: Can MLLM Think Like Holmes for Complex Video Reasoning?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21374