Understanding Temporal Logic Consistency in Video-Language Models through Cross-Modal Attention Discriminability

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Li, Chengzhi, Huang, Heyan, Jian, Ping, Yang, Zhen, Tian, Yaning, Guo, Zhongbin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Li, Chengzhi
Huang, Heyan
Jian, Ping
Yang, Zhen
Tian, Yaning
Guo, Zhongbin
author_facet Li, Chengzhi
Huang, Heyan
Jian, Ping
Yang, Zhen
Tian, Yaning
Guo, Zhongbin
contents Large language models (LLMs) often generate self-contradictory outputs, which severely impacts their reliability and hinders their adoption in practical applications. In video-language models (Video-LLMs), this phenomenon recently draws the attention of researchers. Specifically, these models fail to provide logically consistent responses to rephrased questions based on their grounding outputs. However, the underlying causes of this phenomenon remain underexplored. In this work, we adopt an interpretability-driven approach to analyze, statistically summarize, and intervention the potential factors of the phenomenon. We find that one of the primary reasons for the inconsistency in responses lies in the inability of cross-modal attention heads to effectively distinguish video tokens across different timestamps. To address this, we propose an attention enhancement method called Temporally Conditioned Attention Sharpening (TCAS), which constructs an enhancement objective based on attention distinctions to enhance the model's temporal resolution capability, thereby improving its temporal understanding logic consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the temporal logic consistency of Video-LLMs. Further analyses reveal that our method indeed improves the temporal discriminability of attention heads, validating our conclusions. Additionally, our method even achieves performance improvements in general video temporal grounding tasks, suggesting that temporal logic consistency is an important factor in temporal understanding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_08138
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding Temporal Logic Consistency in Video-Language Models through Cross-Modal Attention Discriminability
Li, Chengzhi
Huang, Heyan
Jian, Ping
Yang, Zhen
Tian, Yaning
Guo, Zhongbin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Multimedia
Large language models (LLMs) often generate self-contradictory outputs, which severely impacts their reliability and hinders their adoption in practical applications. In video-language models (Video-LLMs), this phenomenon recently draws the attention of researchers. Specifically, these models fail to provide logically consistent responses to rephrased questions based on their grounding outputs. However, the underlying causes of this phenomenon remain underexplored. In this work, we adopt an interpretability-driven approach to analyze, statistically summarize, and intervention the potential factors of the phenomenon. We find that one of the primary reasons for the inconsistency in responses lies in the inability of cross-modal attention heads to effectively distinguish video tokens across different timestamps. To address this, we propose an attention enhancement method called Temporally Conditioned Attention Sharpening (TCAS), which constructs an enhancement objective based on attention distinctions to enhance the model's temporal resolution capability, thereby improving its temporal understanding logic consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the temporal logic consistency of Video-LLMs. Further analyses reveal that our method indeed improves the temporal discriminability of attention heads, validating our conclusions. Additionally, our method even achieves performance improvements in general video temporal grounding tasks, suggesting that temporal logic consistency is an important factor in temporal understanding.
title Understanding Temporal Logic Consistency in Video-Language Models through Cross-Modal Attention Discriminability
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08138