CVPR 2026 Papers

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Decision breakdown

4,042papers

Counted from the official paper list; may differ slightly from the number the conference announced.

  • Oral
    1383.4%
  • Poster
    3,90496.6%

Browse all papers

Topic: Video Understanding · 341 papers · Reset filters

TimeViper: A Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Vision-Language Model for Efficient Long Video Understanding

Boshen Xu, Zihan Xiao, Jiaze Li, Jianzhong Ju, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan, Qin Jin

Expand abstract

We introduce TimeViper, a hybrid vision-language model designed to tackle challenges of long video understanding. Processing long videos demands both an efficient model architecture and an effective mechanism for handling extended temporal contexts. To this end, TimeViper adopts a hybrid Mamba-Transformer backbone that combines the efficiency of state-space models with the expressivity of attention mechanisms. Through this hybrid design, we reveal the vision-to-text information aggregation phenomenon, where information progressively flows from vision tokens to text tokens across increasing LLM depth, resulting in severe vision token redundancy. Motivated by this observation, we propose TransV, a token information transfer module that transfers and compresses vision tokens into instruction tokens while maintaining multimodal understanding capabilities. This design enables TimeViper to process hour-long videos exceeding thousands of frames. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that TimeViper competes with state-of-the-art models while reducing inference cost. We further analyze attention behaviors of both Mamba and Transformer layers, offering new insights into hybrid model interpretability. This work represents an initial step towards developing, interpreting, and compressing hybrid Mamba-Transformer architectures.

Poster
FaceCam: Portrait Video Camera Control via Scale-Aware Conditioning

Weijie Lyu, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Zhixin Shu

Expand abstract

We introduce FaceCam, a system that generates video under customizable camera trajectories for monocular human portrait video input. Recent camera control approaches based on large video-generation models have shown promising progress but often exhibit geometric distortions and visual artifacts on portrait videos due to scale-ambiguous camera representations or 3D reconstruction errors. To overcome these limitations, we propose a face-tailored scale-aware representation for camera transformations that provides deterministic conditioning without relying on 3D priors. We train a video generation model on both multi-view studio captures and in-the-wild monocular videos, and introduce two camera-control data generation strategies: synthetic camera motion and multi-shot stitching, to exploit stationary training cameras while generalizing to dynamic, continuous camera trajectories at inference time. Experiments on Ava-256 dataset and diverse in-the-wild videos demonstrate that FaceCam achieves superior performance in camera controllability, visual quality, identity and motion preservation.

Poster
ReDirector: Creating Any-Length Video Retakes with Rotary Camera Encoding

Byeongjun Park, Byung-Hoon Kim, Hyungjin Chung, Jong Chul Ye

Expand abstract

We present ReDirector, a novel camera-controlled video retake generation method for dynamically captured variable-length videos. In particular, we rectify a common misuse of RoPE in previous works by aligning the spatiotemporal positions of the input video and the target retake. Moreover, we introduce Rotary Camera Encoding (RoCE), a camera-conditioned RoPE phase shift that captures and integrates multi-view relationships within and across the input and target videos. By integrating camera conditions into RoPE, our method generalizes to out-of-distribution camera trajectories and video lengths, yielding improved dynamic object localization and static background preservation. Extensive experiments further demonstrate significant improvements in camera controllability, geometric consistency, and video quality across various trajectories and lengths.

Poster
EffectErase: Joint Video Object Removal and Insertion for High-Quality Effect Erasing

Yang Fu, Yike Zheng, Ziyun Dai, Henghui Ding

Expand abstract

Video object removal aims to eliminate dynamic target objects and their visual effects, such as deformation, shadows, and reflections, while restoring seamless backgrounds. Recent diffusion-based video inpainting and object removal methods can remove the objects but often struggle to erase these effects and to synthesize coherent backgrounds. Beyond method limitations, progress is further hampered by the lack of a comprehensive dataset that systematically captures common object effects across varied environments for training and evaluation. To address this, we introduce **VOR** (**V**ideo **O**bject **R**emoval), a large-scale dataset that provides diverse paired videos, each consisting of one video where the target object is present with its effects and a counterpart where the object and effects are absent, with corresponding object masks. VOR contains 60k high-quality video pairs from captured and synthetic sources, covers five effects types, and spans a wide range of object categories as well as complex, dynamic multi-object scenes. Building on VOR, we propose ***EffectErase***, an effect-aware video object removal method that treats video object insertion as the inverse auxiliary task within a reciprocal learning scheme. The model includes task-aware region guidance that focuses learning on affected areas and enables flexible task switching. Then, an insertion-removal consistency objective that encourages complementary behaviors and shared localization of effect regions and structural cues. Trained on VOR, EffectErase achieves superior performance in extensive experiments, delivering high-quality video object effect erasing across diverse scenarios.

Poster
Forecasting 3D Scanpaths in Egocentric Video

Fiona Ryan, Ishwarya Ananthabhotla, Yijun Qian, Judy Hoffman, James M. Rehg, Vamsi Krishna Ithapu, Calvin Murdock

Expand abstract

Forecasting gaze behavior is an important task for understanding user intent and creating AR/VR systems that can anticipate where users will look and interact next. While prior works have addressed predicting scanpaths in static images, forecasting gaze in egocentric videos presents new challenges due to the dynamic nature of the scene and the camera wearer's continuous movement through the 3D environment. To address these challenges, we formulate the novel task of egocentric scanpath prediction as forecasting a sequence of future fixations in 3D Cartesian coordinates relative to the last observed camera pose, producing a 3D scanpath that is grounded in the environment. We propose a transformer architecture that leverages egocentric video frames, head pose, and past 3D gaze observations to predict future 3D fixation sequences. We evaluate our method on the Aria Digital Twin dataset. Our findings establish a baseline for the novel task of 3D scanpath prediction and highlight important architectural elements for our task.

Poster
TextOVSR: Text-Guided Real-World Opera Video Super-Resolution

Hua Chang, Xin Xu, Wei Liu, Jiayi Wu, Kui Jiang, Fei Ma, Qi Tian

Expand abstract

Many classic opera videos exhibit poor visual quality due to the limitations of early filming equipment and long-term degradation during storage. Although real-world video super-resolution (RWVSR) has achieved significant advances in recent years, directly applying existing methods to degraded opera videos remains challenging. The difficulties are twofold. First, accurately modeling real-world degradations is complex: simplistic combinations of classical degradation kernels fail to capture the authentic noise distribution, while methods that extract real noise patches from external datasets are prone to style mismatches that introduce visual artifacts. Second, current RWVSR methods, which rely solely on degraded image features, struggle to reconstruct realistic and detailed textures due to a lack of high-level semantic guidance. To address these issues, we propose a Text-guided Dual-Branch Opera Video Super-Resolution (TextOVSR) network, which introduces two types of textual prompts to guide the super-resolution process. Specifically, degradation-descriptive text, derived from the degradation process, is incorporated into the negative branch to constrain the solution space. Simultaneously, content-descriptive text is incorporated into a positive branch and our proposed Text-Enhanced Discriminator (TED) to provide semantic guidance for enhanced texture reconstruction. Furthermore, we design a Degradation-Robust Feature Fusion (DRF) module to facilitate cross-modal feature fusion while suppressing degradation interference. Experiments on our OperaLQ benchmark show that TextOVSR outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. The code is available at https://github.com/ChangHua0/TextOVSR.

Poster
DeRVOS: Decoupling Consistent Trajectory Generation and Multimodal Understanding for Referring Video Object Segmentation

Wenxuan Cheng, Ming Dai, Huimin LU, Wankou Yang

Expand abstract

Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) aims to segment objects within a video according to natural language expressions. Unlike earlier works focusing on static single-object scenarios, recent studies address more complex motion scenes. Previous methods typically adopt a query-based, logically multi-stage pipeline to handle these scenarios. However, this paradigm learns trajectory consistency modeling and multimodal fusion from scratch, which often leads to trajectory inconsistencies and insufficient multimodal understanding. To address these limitations, we propose DeRVOS, a framework that decouples RVOS into two key branches: consistent trajectory generation and multimodal understanding. We extract temporally consistent object representations using a powerful pretrained instance trajectory generation model and perform cross-modal alignment via a unified multimodal encoder, enabling upstream modeling of trajectory consistency and vision-language understanding. This design reduces RVOS to the task of modeling the relationship between referring expressions and instance trajectories. To connect the two branches and enable efficient motion-aware semantic understanding, we introduce the Trajectory Alignment and Implicit Selection (TAIS) module, which progressively performs cross-frame multimodal alignment and motion-guided implicit trajectory selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeRVOS achieves state-of-the-art results on both traditional RVOS benchmarks and the challenging MeViS dataset, surpassing LVLM-based methods by 4.7%.

Poster
UFVideo: Towards Unified Fine-Grained Video Cooperative Understanding with Large Language Models

Hewen Pan, Cong Wei, Dashuang Liang, Zepeng Huang, Pengfei Gao, Ziqi Zhou, Lulu Xue, Pengfei Yan, Xiaoming Wei, Minghui Li, Shengshan Hu

Expand abstract

With the advancement of multi-modal Large Language Models (LLMs), Video LLMs have been further developed to perform on holistic and specialized video understanding. However, existing works are limited to specialized video understanding tasks, failing to achieve a comprehensive and multi-grained video perception. To bridge this gap, we introduce UFVideo, the first Video LLM with unified multi-grained cooperative understanding capabilities. Specifically, we design unified visual-language guided alignment to flexibly handle video understanding across global, pixel and temporal scales within a single model. UFVideo dynamically encodes the visual and text inputs of different tasks and generates the textual response, temporal localization, or grounded mask. Additionally, to evaluate challenging multi-grained video understanding tasks, we construct the UFVideo-Bench consisting of three distinct collaborative tasks within the scales, which demonstrates UFVideo's flexibility and advantages over GPT-4o. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our model across 9 public benchmarks covering various common video understanding tasks, providing valuable insights for future Video LLMs.

Poster
The Road Less Seen: Segment Exploration for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection

Anusha Acharya, Hitesh Sapkota, Qi Yu, Xumin Liu

Expand abstract

Weakly supervised learning (WSL) provides a cost-effective learning paradigm for video anomaly detection (VAD) from data with video-level annotation instead of requiring costly fine-grained segment-level annotation. Although contemporary methods have shown promising results on challenging real-world surveillance videos, most of them are evaluated using the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUROC). We reveal that a high AUROC could result in a very low recall for meaningful False Positive Rate (FPR) thresholds. Thus, these models suffer from limited practical values, especially in high-stake domains (e.g. public safety and medical diagnosis), where missing the true anomalies incur high cost. This surprising phenomenon is rooted in the interplay of weak supervision and the highly imbalanced distribution between normal and anomalous video segments. To tackle this key challenge in VAD systems, we propose a novel dual exploration strategy that combines temporal clustering with uncertainty-based segment exploration. Temporal clustering selects diverse segments based on both semantic and temporal similarity, while uncertainty-based sampling targets low-scoring segments with high model uncertainty. The main aim of exploration is to ensure that the model learns from a wide range of patterns, both diverse and ambiguous, resulting in more informed and robust decision-making, and reduction in false negatives. Meanwhile, we adopt two practical metrics to replace the commonly used AUROC score for a more effective measure for evaluation. Experiments conducted in challenging real-world videos demonstrate that our exploration strategy improves VAD performance compared to the baselines on these metrics, which justifies its improved practical value in real-world settings.

Poster
Mesh4D: 4D Mesh Reconstruction and Tracking from Monocular Video

Zeren Jiang, Chuanxia Zheng, Iro Laina, Diane Larlus, Andrea Vedaldi

Expand abstract

We propose Mesh4D, a feed-forward model for monocular 4D mesh reconstruction. Given a monocular video of a dynamic object, our model reconstructs the object's complete 3D shape and motion, represented as a deformation field. Our key contribution is a compact latent space that encodes the entire animation sequence. This latent space is learned by an autoencoder that, during training, is guided by the skeletal structure of the training objects, providing strong priors on plausible deformations. Crucially, skeletal information is not required at inference time. The encoder employs spatio-temporal attention, yielding a more stable representation of the object's overall deformation. Building on this representation, we train a latent diffusion model that, conditioned on the input video and the mesh reconstructed from the first frame, predicts the full animation in one shot. We evaluate Mesh4D on reconstruction and novel view synthesis benchmarks, outperforming prior methods in recovering accurate 3D shape and deformation.

Poster
Adapting Lightweight Image-based Counting Models for Video Crowd Counting

Weibo Shu, Antoni B. Chan

Expand abstract

Video crowd counting aims to predict the people count in each frame of a video. It requires effectively leveraging spatio-temporal (ST) information in videos while satisfying real-time constraints. However, most existing methods use ST information from neighboring frames through auxiliary extraction and fusion modules---resulting in large computational cost and the need to buffer multiple frames during inference. Such designs limit their practicality in real-world applications with limited computational resources or stringent real-time requirements. To address these issues, we revisit video crowd counting from the perspective of lightweight image-based counting models that enable real-time deployment under limited resources. We analytically define ST information in a model-independent and statistically interpretable manner, and incorporate it into training via a statistical regularizer that effectively enhances model performance without adding modules or inference overhead. Most framework hyperparameters are further formulated as statistical inference problems, allowing automatic estimation from data and consequently efficient adaptation to new scenarios.Our framework unifies video crowd counting and image-based counting models under a compact, principled formulation that is lightweight, portable, and efficient. We also establish theoretical foundations for adapting image-based counting models to video crowd counting and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency across six benchmarks, including challenging DRONECROWD and VSCROWD.

Poster
Score2Instruct: Scaling Up Video Quality-Centric Instructions via Automated Dimension Scoring

Qizhi Xie, Kun Yuan, Yunpeng Qu, Jiachao Gong, Mingda Wu, Ming Sun, Chao Zhou, Jihong Zhu

Expand abstract

Classical video quality assessment (VQA) methods generate a numerical score to judge a video's perceived visual fidelity and clarity. Yet, a score fails to describe the video's complex quality dimensions (e.g., noise), restricting its applicability. Benefiting from the human-friendly linguistic output, adapting video large multimodal models (LMMs) to VQA via instruction tuning has the potential to address this issue. The core of the approach lies in the video quality-centric instruction data. Previous explorations mainly focus on the image domain, and their data generation processes heavily rely on human quality annotations and proprietary systems (e.g., GPT-4), limiting data scalability and effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose the Score-based Instruction Generation (SIG) pipeline. Specifically, SIG first scores multiple quality dimensions of an unlabeled video and maps scores to text-defined levels. It then explicitly incorporates a hierarchical Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to model the correlation between specific dimensions and overall quality, mimicking the human visual system's (HVS) reasoning process. The automated pipeline eliminates the reliance on expert-written quality descriptions and proprietary systems, ensuring data scalability and generation efficiency. To this end, the resulting Score2Instruct (S2I) dataset contains over 320K diverse instruction-response pairs, laying the basis for instruction tuning. Moreover, to advance video LMMs' quality scoring and justification abilities simultaneously, we devise a progressive tuning strategy to fully unleash the power of S2I. Built upon SIG, we further curate a benchmark termed S2I-Bench with 400 open-ended questions to better evaluate the quality justification capacity of video LMMs. Experimental results on the S2I-Bench and existing benchmarks indicate that our method consistently improves quality scoring and justification capabilities across multiple video LMMs. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/KeiChiTse/S2I.

Poster
MedGRPO: Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning for Heterogeneous Medical Video Understanding

Yuhao Su, Anwesa Choudhuri, Zhongpai Gao, Benjamin Planche, Van Nguyen Nguyen, Meng Zheng, Yuhan Shen, Arun Innanje, Terrence Chen, Ehsan Elhamifar, Ziyan Wu

Expand abstract

Large vision-language models struggle with medical video understanding, where spatial precision, temporal reasoning, and clinical semantics are critical. To address this, we first introduce MedVidBench, a large-scale benchmark of 531,850 video-instruction pairs across 8 medical sources spanning video, segment, and frame-level tasks, curated through a rigorous quality assurance pipeline with expert-guided prompting and dual-model validation. While supervised fine-tuning on MedVidBench yields noticeable gains, standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) fails due to imbalanced reward scales across datasets, which destabilizes optimization and leads to training collapse. To overcome this, we introduce MedGRPO, a novel RL framework for balanced multi-dataset training with two key innovations: (1) cross-dataset reward normalization that maps each dataset's median performance to a common reward value, ensuring fair optimization regardless of difficulty, and (2) a medical LLM judge that evaluates caption quality on five clinical dimensions through comparative similarity scoring. Supervised fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B on MedVidBench substantially outperforms GPT-4.1 and Gemini-2.5-Flash across all tasks, demonstrating MedVidBench's efficacy, while our MedGRPO framework further improves upon the SFT baseline across grounding and captioning tasks. Our work establishes a foundational benchmark and robust training methodology for advancing vision-language models in medical domains.

Poster
VideoARM: Agentic Reasoning over Hierarchical Memory for Long-Form Video Understanding

Yufei Yin, Qianke Meng, Minghao Chen, Jiajun Ding, Zhenwei Shao, Zhou Yu

Expand abstract

Long-form video understanding remains challenging due to the extended temporal structure and dense multimodal cues. Despite recent progress, many existing approaches still rely on hand-crafted reasoning pipelines or employ token-consuming video preprocessing to guide MLLMs in autonomous reasoning. To overcome these limitations, we introduce VideoARM, an agentic reasoning-over-hierarchical-memory paradigm for long-form video understanding. Instead of static, exhaustive preprocessing, VideoARM performs adaptive, on-the-fly agentic reasoning and memory construction. Specifically, VideoARM performs an adaptive and continuous loop of observing, thinking, acting, and memorizing, where a controller autonomously invokes tools to interpret the video in a coarse-to-fine manner, thereby substantially reducing token consumption. In parallel, a hierarchical multimodal memory continuously captures and updates multi-level clues throughout the operation of the agent, providing precise contextual information to support the controller in decision-making. Experiments on prevalent benchmarks demonstrate that VideoARM outperforms the state-of-the-art method, DVD, while significantly reducing token consumption for long-form videos.

Poster
D2FANet: Enhancing Video Object Detection with Dual-Domain Feature Aggregation Network

Qiang Qi, Wenqi Shang, Meifang Wang, Xiao Wang

Expand abstract

Accurately capturing and aggregating spatiotemporal information has become crucial for video object detection. Previous methods mainly perform feature aggregation in the spatiotemporal domain, treating all regions indiscriminately and overlooking both their relative importance and the frequency characteristics that capture periodic motion patterns. This limits the capability of these methods to capture dynamic interactions and adapt to complex scene variations. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual-Domain Feature Aggregation Network (D2FANet) for video object detection, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first work to introduce the frequency-domain feature aggregation into the video object detection task. By collaboratively modeling spatiotemporal and frequency information, our D2FANet enhances motion awareness and temporal consistency, thereby improving detection accuracy. First, we develop a frequency-domain feature aggregation module that decomposes frame features into high- and low-frequency distributions and reinforces object query representations through aggregating multi-scale frequency features. Second, we design a spatiotemporal-domain feature aggregation module that leverages an importance guidance mechanism to dynamically emphasize regions of different importance and reinforces object query representations via guiding the aggregation of spatiotemporal features. Experiments on the ImageNet VID and EPIC-KITCHENS datasets demonstrate that D2FANet achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Poster
LLaDA-MedV: Exploring Large Language Diffusion Models for Biomedical Image Understanding

XUANZHAO DONG, Wenhui Zhu, Xiwen Chen, Zhipeng Wang, Peijie Qiu, Shao Tang, Xin Li, Yalin Wang

Expand abstract

Autoregressive models (ARMs) have long dominated the landscape of biomedical vision-language models (VLMs). Recently, masked diffusion models such as LLaDA have emerged as promising alternatives, yet their application in the biomedical domain remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce LLaDA-MedV, the first large language diffusion model tailored for biomedical image understanding through vision instruction tuning. LLaDA-MedV achieves relative performance gains of 7.855% over LLaVA-Med and 1.867% over LLaDA-V in the open-ended biomedical visual conversation task, and sets new state-of-the-art accuracy on the closed-form subset of three VQA benchmarks: 84.93% on VQA-RAD, 92.31% on SLAKE, and 95.15% on PathVQA. Furthermore, a detailed comparison with LLaVA-Med suggests that LLaDA-MedV is capable of generating reasonably longer responses by explicitly controlling response length, which can lead to more informative outputs. We also conduct an in-depth analysis of both the training and inference stages, highlighting the critical roles of initialization weight selection, fine-tuning strategies, and the interplay between sampling steps and response repetition. The code and model weight is released at https://github.com/LLM-VLM-GSL/LLaDA-MedV.

Poster
Robust Promptable Video Object Segmentation

Sohyun Lee, Yeho Gwon, Lukas Hoyer, Konrad Schindler, Christos Sakaridis, Suha Kwak

Expand abstract

The performance of promptable video object segmentation (PVOS) models substantially degrades under input corruptions, which prevents PVOS deployment in safety-critical domains. This paper offers the first comprehensive study on robust PVOS (RobustPVOS). We first construct a new, comprehensive benchmark with two real-world evaluation datasets of 351 video clips and more than 2,500 object masks under real-world adverse conditions. At the same time, we generate synthetic training data by applying diverse and temporally varying corruptions to existing VOS datasets. Moreover, we present a new RobustPVOS method, dubbed Memory-object-conditioned Gated-rank Adaptation (MoGA). The key to successfully performing RobustPVOS is two-fold: effectively handling object-specific degradation and ensuring temporal consistency in predictions. MoGA leverages object-specific representations maintained in memory across frames to condition the robustification process, which allows the model to handle each tracked object differently in a temporally consistent way. Extensive experiments on our benchmark validate MoGA's efficacy, showing consistent and significant improvements across diverse corruption types on both synthetic and real-world datasets, establishing a strong baseline for future RobustPVOS research. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://sohyun-l.github.io/RobustPVOS_project_page/.

Poster
Back to the Feature: Explaining Video Classifiers with Video Counterfactual Explanations

Chao Wang, Chengan Che, Xinyue Chen, Sophia Tsoka, Luis C. Garcia-Peraza-Herrera

Expand abstract

Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) are minimal and semantically meaningful modifications of the input of a model that alter the model predictions. They highlight the decisive features the model relies on, providing contrastive interpretations for classifiers. State-of-the-art visual counterfactual explanation methods have primarily focused on interpreting image classifiers, leaving the domain of video models relatively underexplored. For the video CFEs to be useful, they have to be physically plausible, temporally coherent, and exhibit smooth motion trajectories. Existing CFE image-based methods, designed to explain image classifiers, lack the capacity to generate temporally coherent, smooth and physically plausible video CFEs. To address this, we propose Back To The Feature (BTTF), an optimization framework that generates video CFEs. Our method introduces two novel features, 1) an optimization scheme to retrieve the initial latent noise conditioned by the first frame of the input video, 2) a two-stage optimization strategy to enable the search for counterfactual videos in the vicinity of the input video. Both optimization processes are guided solely by the target classifier, ensuring the explanation is faithful. To accelerate convergence, we also introduce a progressive optimization strategy that incrementally increases the number of denoising steps. Extensive experiments on video datasets such as Shape-Moving (motion classification), MEAD (emotion classification), and NTU RGB+D (action classification) show that our BTTF effectively generates valid, visually similar and realistic counterfactual videos that provide concrete insights into the classifier's decision-making mechanism.

Poster
Understanding the Role of Hallucination in Reinforcement Post-Training of Multimodal Reasoning Models

Gengwei Zhang, Jie Peng, Zhen Tan, Mufan Qiu, Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub, Vaishnav Tadiparthi, Kwonjoon Lee, Yanyong Zhang, Tianlong Chen

Expand abstract

The recent success of reinforcement learning (RL) in large reasoning models has inspired the growing adoption of RL for post-training Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance their visual reasoning capabilities. Although many studies have reported improved performance, it remains unclear whether RL training truly enables models to learn from visual information. In this work, we propose the Hallucination-as-Cue Framework, an analytical framework designed to investigate the effects of RL-based post-training on multimodal reasoning models from the perspective of model hallucination. Specifically, we introduce hallucination-inductive, modality-specific corruptions that remove or replace essential information required to derive correct answers, thereby forcing the model to reason by hallucination. By applying these corruptions during both training and evaluation, our framework provides a unique perspective for diagnosing RL training dynamics and understanding the intrinsic properties of datasets. Through extensive experiments and analyses across multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks, we reveal that the role of model hallucination for RL-training is more significant than previously recognized. For instance, we find that RL post-training under purely hallucination-inductive settings can still significantly improve models' reasoning performance, and in some cases even outperform standard training. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about MLLM reasoning training and motivate the development of more modality-aware RL-based training designs.

Poster
VirtueBench: Evaluating Trustworthiness under Uncertainty in Long Video Understanding

Xueqing Yu, Bohan Li, Yan Li, Zhenheng Yang

Expand abstract

Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made remarkable progress in multimodal understanding tasks, yet their evaluation on long video understanding remains unreliable. Due to limited frame inputs, key frames necessary for answering the question may be missing from the model's input. However, models that truthfully refuse to answer under such uncertainty are marked as incorrect, while those that guess may coincidentally produce the correct answer and thus obtain deceptively higher accuracy, leading to misleading evaluation results and encouraging models to guess rather than respond honestly. To address this issue, we introduce VirtueBench, a benchmark explicitly designed to assess model trustworthiness under uncertainty. VirtueBench constructs multiple frame-sampling levels for each video and provides ground truths that distinguish between answerable and unanswerable cases. Evaluations on 25 open-source and commercial VLMs reveal distinct refusal behaviors across different model families, with refusal accuracy ranging from over 70% in the best models to nearly 0% in the worst. Moreover, most models exhibit a substantial drop in refusal when the prompt does not explicitly require them to do so. These findings highlight the need for developing trustworthy VLMs for multimodal understanding, guided by benchmarks and leaderboards that emphasize reliability and trustworthiness.

Poster