VideoReasonBench: Can MLLMs Perform Vision-Centric Complex Video Reasoning?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Yuanxin, Ouyang, Kun, Wu, Haoning, Liu, Yi, Sui, Lin, Li, Xinhao, Zhong, Yan, Charles, Y., Zhou, Xinyu, Sun, Xu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Yuanxin
Ouyang, Kun
Wu, Haoning
Liu, Yi
Sui, Lin
Li, Xinhao
Zhong, Yan
Charles, Y.
Zhou, Xinyu
Sun, Xu
author_facet Liu, Yuanxin
Ouyang, Kun
Wu, Haoning
Liu, Yi
Sui, Lin
Li, Xinhao
Zhong, Yan
Charles, Y.
Zhou, Xinyu
Sun, Xu
contents Recent studies have shown that long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning can significantly enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex tasks. However, this benefit is yet to be demonstrated in the domain of video understanding, since most existing benchmarks lack the reasoning depth required to demonstrate the advantages of extended CoT chains. While recent efforts have proposed benchmarks aimed at video reasoning, the tasks are often knowledge-driven and do not rely heavily on visual content. To bridge this gap, we introduce VideoReasonBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate vision-centric, complex video reasoning. To ensure visual richness and high reasoning complexity, each video in VideoReasonBench depicts a sequence of fine-grained operations on a latent state that is only visible in part of the video. The questions evaluate three escalating levels of video reasoning skills: recalling observed visual information, inferring the content of latent states, and predicting information beyond the video. Under such task setting, models have to precisely recall multiple operations in the video, and perform step-by-step reasoning to get correct final answers for these questions. Using VideoReasonBench, we comprehensively evaluate 18 state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), finding that most perform poorly on complex video reasoning -- e.g., GPT-4o achieves only 6.9% accuracy -- while the thinking-enhanced Gemini-2.5-Pro significantly outperforms others with 56.0% accuracy. Our investigations on "test-time scaling" further reveal that extended thinking budget, while offering none or minimal benefits on existing video benchmarks, is essential for improving the performance on VideoReasonBench.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23359
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VideoReasonBench: Can MLLMs Perform Vision-Centric Complex Video Reasoning?
Liu, Yuanxin
Ouyang, Kun
Wu, Haoning
Liu, Yi
Sui, Lin
Li, Xinhao
Zhong, Yan
Charles, Y.
Zhou, Xinyu
Sun, Xu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent studies have shown that long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning can significantly enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex tasks. However, this benefit is yet to be demonstrated in the domain of video understanding, since most existing benchmarks lack the reasoning depth required to demonstrate the advantages of extended CoT chains. While recent efforts have proposed benchmarks aimed at video reasoning, the tasks are often knowledge-driven and do not rely heavily on visual content. To bridge this gap, we introduce VideoReasonBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate vision-centric, complex video reasoning. To ensure visual richness and high reasoning complexity, each video in VideoReasonBench depicts a sequence of fine-grained operations on a latent state that is only visible in part of the video. The questions evaluate three escalating levels of video reasoning skills: recalling observed visual information, inferring the content of latent states, and predicting information beyond the video. Under such task setting, models have to precisely recall multiple operations in the video, and perform step-by-step reasoning to get correct final answers for these questions. Using VideoReasonBench, we comprehensively evaluate 18 state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), finding that most perform poorly on complex video reasoning -- e.g., GPT-4o achieves only 6.9% accuracy -- while the thinking-enhanced Gemini-2.5-Pro significantly outperforms others with 56.0% accuracy. Our investigations on "test-time scaling" further reveal that extended thinking budget, while offering none or minimal benefits on existing video benchmarks, is essential for improving the performance on VideoReasonBench.
title VideoReasonBench: Can MLLMs Perform Vision-Centric Complex Video Reasoning?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23359