cs.CVJun 22, 2026

VideoLatent: Video-Language Learning via Latent Self-Forcing

Authors: Zi-Yuan Hu, Zicong Tang, Shijia Huang, Yanyang Li, Michael R. Lyu, Liwei Wang

Organizations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong · Weitu AI

Abstract

Recent advancements in chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning have shown promise in enhancing video understanding and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing CoT-based MLLMs require labor-intensive CoT annotations and incur substantial training and inference overhead. While visual latent reasoning has emerged as a more efficient alternative, existing methods primarily focus on image tasks and heavily rely on additional supervision signals for visual latent generation (e.g., CoT traces, auxiliary images, or fine-grained annotations), limiting their scalability and transferability to video tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce VideoLatent, a novel MLLM equipped with a latent injection module tailored for video understanding and reasoning. Specifically, VideoLatent learns to perform visual latent reasoning using a new latent self-forcing training paradigm, which comprises latent alignment and latent diversity objectives, and relies solely on standard video-question-answer triplets. Extensive experiments across 14 benchmarks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms existing standard and latent MLLMs on general video understanding and complex video reasoning. Compared with Video-R1, our VideoLatent achieves superior computational efficiency, reducing training/inference overhead by ∼\sim6×\times/∼\sim68×\times. Moreover, experiments demonstrate that our method has strong generalizability to different MLLM backbones and different model scales.

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