What Happens When: Learning Temporal Orders of Events in Videos

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ahn, Daechul, Choi, Yura, Choi, Hyeonbeom, Cho, Seongwon, Kim, San, Choi, Jonghyun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ahn, Daechul
Choi, Yura
Choi, Hyeonbeom
Cho, Seongwon
Kim, San
Choi, Jonghyun
author_facet Ahn, Daechul
Choi, Yura
Choi, Hyeonbeom
Cho, Seongwon
Kim, San
Choi, Jonghyun
contents Video Large Multimodal Models (VLMMs) have shown impressive performance in video understanding, yet their ability to accurately capture the temporal order of multiple events remains underexplored. We interestingly observe that, even when video frames are scrambled, models perform very well on the existing benchmarks by comprehensive experiments. This implies that VLMMs may not necessarily rely on accurate sequential processing of visual events, but instead depend on prior knowledge of typical scenarios to answer the question. To benchmark temporal understanding capabilities in VLMMs, we propose VECTOR, designed to explicitly assess a model's ability to identify the temporal order of events. On this benchmark, we observe that various VLMMs often fail to understand the orders of events. To address this, we propose MECOT (Multi-Event instruction fine-tuning with Chain-of-Thought), which (1) trains models on detailed, event-by-event video descriptions and (2) using chain-of-thought prompts at inference to enhance temporal awareness. MECOT outperforms prior arts on VECTOR as well as improving performance on existing video benchmarks, implying effectiveness of temporal understanding. We release our code, model and datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_08979
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What Happens When: Learning Temporal Orders of Events in Videos
Ahn, Daechul
Choi, Yura
Choi, Hyeonbeom
Cho, Seongwon
Kim, San
Choi, Jonghyun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Video Large Multimodal Models (VLMMs) have shown impressive performance in video understanding, yet their ability to accurately capture the temporal order of multiple events remains underexplored. We interestingly observe that, even when video frames are scrambled, models perform very well on the existing benchmarks by comprehensive experiments. This implies that VLMMs may not necessarily rely on accurate sequential processing of visual events, but instead depend on prior knowledge of typical scenarios to answer the question. To benchmark temporal understanding capabilities in VLMMs, we propose VECTOR, designed to explicitly assess a model's ability to identify the temporal order of events. On this benchmark, we observe that various VLMMs often fail to understand the orders of events. To address this, we propose MECOT (Multi-Event instruction fine-tuning with Chain-of-Thought), which (1) trains models on detailed, event-by-event video descriptions and (2) using chain-of-thought prompts at inference to enhance temporal awareness. MECOT outperforms prior arts on VECTOR as well as improving performance on existing video benchmarks, implying effectiveness of temporal understanding. We release our code, model and datasets.
title What Happens When: Learning Temporal Orders of Events in Videos
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08979