HeiCo-FOCUS: A Clinically Grounded Dataset for Long-Context Video Understanding

Surgical video understanding is a crucial prerequisite for advancing Computer-Assisted Surgery. While vision-language models (VLMs) have recently been applied to the surgical domain, existing surgical vision-language datasets lack in capturing and evaluating complex, interleaved spatial-temporal dynamics. Creating large scale datasets that accurately represent fine-grained spatial-temporal relationships in surgical videos is challenging due to costly manual annotations or error-prone generation using large language models. To address this gap, we introduce the SurgSTU-Pipeline, a deterministic generation pipeline featuring temporal and spatial continuity filtering to reliably create surgical datasets for fine-grained spatial-temporal multimodal understanding. Applying this pipeline to publicly available surgical datasets, we create the SurgSTU dataset, comprising 6711 video clips densely extended with 150k fine-grained spatial-temporal question-answer samples. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that while state-of-the-art generalist VLMs struggle in zero-shot settings, their spatial-temporal capabilities can be improved through in-context learning. A fine-tuned VLM on the SurgSTU training dataset achieves highest performance among all spatial-temporal tasks, validating the dataset's efficacy to improve spatial-temporal understanding of VLMs in surgical videos. The project is available here: https://lennart-maack.github.io/SurgSTU-project

Video large language models (Video-LLMs) have made strong progress in general video understanding, but their ability to maintain temporal object consistency remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks often emphasize event recognition, action understanding, or coarse temporal reasoning, while rarely testing whether models can preserve the identity, state, and continuity of the same object across occlusion, disappearance, reappearance, state transitions, and cross-object interactions. We introduce TOC-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating temporal object consistency in Video-LLMs. TOC-Bench is object-track grounded: each queried subject is linked to a per-frame trajectory and a structured temporal event timeline. To ensure that questions require temporally ordered visual evidence rather than language priors, single-frame shortcuts, or unordered frame cues, we design a three-layer temporal-necessity filtering protocol, which removes 60.7% of candidate QA pairs and retains 17,900 temporally dependent items across 10 diagnostic dimensions. From this pool, we construct a human-verified benchmark with 2,323 high-quality QA pairs over 1,951 videos. Experiments on representative Video-LLMs show that temporal object consistency remains a major unsolved challenge, with notable weaknesses in event counting, event ordering, identity-sensitive reasoning, and hallucination-aware verification, even when models perform well on general video understanding benchmarks. These results suggest that object-centric temporal coherence is a key bottleneck for current Video-LLMs, and that TOC-Bench provides a focused platform for diagnosing and improving object-aware temporal reasoning. The resource is available at https://github.com/cjzcjz666/toc_bench.git.

Real-world long video understanding requires models to perform continuous tracking, information integration and memory retention over massive temporal spans within extreme video durations. Mastering this intense cognitive load constitutes the fundamental bottleneck in long video understanding. While existing benchmarks have driven progress by scaling up video duration, their evaluation tasks often require comprehending only short and isolated video segments, falling short of capturing the challenge of ultra-long-context reasoning. To measure this cognitive load, we emphasize continuous certificate length, defined as the video length a human must continuously watch to definitively answer a given question. Driven by this metric, we introduce VideoOdyssey, a benchmark specifically designed for ultra-long-context and omni-modal video understanding. VideoOdyssey is characterized by three key features: 1) Extreme video duration and diversity: spanning 11 domains and 54 subcategories with an average video duration of 109 minutes; 2) Comprehensive evaluation scenarios: offering two subsets to address different research focuses, i.e., VideoOdyssey-V for probing the limits of visual understanding in MLLMs, and VideoOdyssey-AV for evaluating synchronized audio-visual understanding for omni-modal models; 3) Ultra-long and multi-level continuous certificates: extending the average continuous certificate to 16 minutes for VideoOdyssey-V and 12.8 minutes for VideoOdyssey-AV. Crucially, we design 5 granular levels from seconds to hours, providing a comprehensive diagnostic tool to evaluate models across varying context lengths and cognitive loads. Extensive evaluations show that bottlenecks of current MLLMs extend beyond simple retrieval to include struggles with continuous reasoning across varying context lengths, fine-grained perception, and non-verbal omni-modal understanding.