A Shortcut-aware Video-QA Benchmark for Physical Understanding via Minimal Video Pairs

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Krojer, Benno, Komeili, Mojtaba, Ross, Candace, Garrido, Quentin, Sinha, Koustuv, Ballas, Nicolas, Assran, Mahmoud
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912425274507264
author Krojer, Benno
Komeili, Mojtaba
Ross, Candace
Garrido, Quentin
Sinha, Koustuv
Ballas, Nicolas
Assran, Mahmoud
author_facet Krojer, Benno
Komeili, Mojtaba
Ross, Candace
Garrido, Quentin
Sinha, Koustuv
Ballas, Nicolas
Assran, Mahmoud
contents Existing benchmarks for assessing the spatio-temporal understanding and reasoning abilities of video language models are susceptible to score inflation due to the presence of shortcut solutions based on superficial visual or textual cues. This paper mitigates the challenges in accurately assessing model performance by introducing the Minimal Video Pairs (MVP) benchmark, a simple shortcut-aware video QA benchmark for assessing the physical understanding of video language models. The benchmark is comprised of 55K high-quality multiple-choice video QA examples focusing on physical world understanding. Examples are curated from nine video data sources, spanning first-person egocentric and exocentric videos, robotic interaction data, and cognitive science intuitive physics benchmarks. To mitigate shortcut solutions that rely on superficial visual or textual cues and biases, each sample in MVP has a minimal-change pair -- a visually similar video accompanied by an identical question but an opposing answer. To answer a question correctly, a model must provide correct answers for both examples in the minimal-change pair; as such, models that solely rely on visual or textual biases would achieve below random performance. Human performance on MVP is 92.9\%, while the best open-source state-of-the-art video-language model achieves 40.2\% compared to random performance at 25\%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_09987
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Shortcut-aware Video-QA Benchmark for Physical Understanding via Minimal Video Pairs
Krojer, Benno
Komeili, Mojtaba
Ross, Candace
Garrido, Quentin
Sinha, Koustuv
Ballas, Nicolas
Assran, Mahmoud
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Existing benchmarks for assessing the spatio-temporal understanding and reasoning abilities of video language models are susceptible to score inflation due to the presence of shortcut solutions based on superficial visual or textual cues. This paper mitigates the challenges in accurately assessing model performance by introducing the Minimal Video Pairs (MVP) benchmark, a simple shortcut-aware video QA benchmark for assessing the physical understanding of video language models. The benchmark is comprised of 55K high-quality multiple-choice video QA examples focusing on physical world understanding. Examples are curated from nine video data sources, spanning first-person egocentric and exocentric videos, robotic interaction data, and cognitive science intuitive physics benchmarks. To mitigate shortcut solutions that rely on superficial visual or textual cues and biases, each sample in MVP has a minimal-change pair -- a visually similar video accompanied by an identical question but an opposing answer. To answer a question correctly, a model must provide correct answers for both examples in the minimal-change pair; as such, models that solely rely on visual or textual biases would achieve below random performance. Human performance on MVP is 92.9\%, while the best open-source state-of-the-art video-language model achieves 40.2\% compared to random performance at 25\%.
title A Shortcut-aware Video-QA Benchmark for Physical Understanding via Minimal Video Pairs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09987