Seeing the Arrow of Time in Large Multimodal Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Xue, Zihui, Luo, Mi, Grauman, Kristen
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Xue, Zihui
Luo, Mi
Grauman, Kristen
author_facet Xue, Zihui
Luo, Mi
Grauman, Kristen
contents The Arrow of Time (AoT)-time's irreversible flow shaping physical events-is fundamental to video comprehension, yet remains a significant challenge for modern large multimodal models (LMMs). Current LMMs struggle to perceive and utilize temporal directionality in video when responding to language queries, obstructing deeper temporal understanding. We tackle this deficiency by first providing a critical analysis of existing benchmarks and models. We then introduce ArrowRL, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based training strategy with an innovative reverse reward that instills AoT awareness by encouraging divergent video interpretations between forward and reversed visual frames. For rigorous evaluation, we additionally develop AoTBench, a new multi-faceted benchmark probing temporally challenging questions. Experiments show ArrowRL greatly advances temporal perception: it not only achieves substantial improvements on our challenging AoTBench but also demonstrably boosts performance on standard video question answering (VQA) benchmarks (with peak accuracy gains reaching over 20% and 10% respectively). This validates ArrowRL's effectiveness and highlights the critical need for dedicated AoT understanding in LMMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_03340
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Seeing the Arrow of Time in Large Multimodal Models
Xue, Zihui
Luo, Mi
Grauman, Kristen
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The Arrow of Time (AoT)-time's irreversible flow shaping physical events-is fundamental to video comprehension, yet remains a significant challenge for modern large multimodal models (LMMs). Current LMMs struggle to perceive and utilize temporal directionality in video when responding to language queries, obstructing deeper temporal understanding. We tackle this deficiency by first providing a critical analysis of existing benchmarks and models. We then introduce ArrowRL, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based training strategy with an innovative reverse reward that instills AoT awareness by encouraging divergent video interpretations between forward and reversed visual frames. For rigorous evaluation, we additionally develop AoTBench, a new multi-faceted benchmark probing temporally challenging questions. Experiments show ArrowRL greatly advances temporal perception: it not only achieves substantial improvements on our challenging AoTBench but also demonstrably boosts performance on standard video question answering (VQA) benchmarks (with peak accuracy gains reaching over 20% and 10% respectively). This validates ArrowRL's effectiveness and highlights the critical need for dedicated AoT understanding in LMMs.
title Seeing the Arrow of Time in Large Multimodal Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03340