Overview

Video reasoning asks models to interpret how people, objects, and scenes change over time, rather than rely only on information in individual frames. Common approaches include multimodal language models with temporal grounding, event or scene graphs, memory and retrieval for long videos, and agents that select frames or use tools; reinforcement learning increasingly rewards answers tied to visual evidence. Benchmarks test video question answering, temporal localization, causal and spatial reasoning, egocentric understanding, and cross-view or cross-video inference. A central challenge is ensuring that fluent reasoning reflects correctly perceived and grounded evidence, especially over long horizons, while keeping computation manageable.

Latest papers

CardsList

211 papers33 papers in the last four weeks, up 267% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Act2See: Emergent Active Visual Perception for Video Reasoning

    May 3, 2026Martin Q. Ma, Yuxiao Qu, Aditya Agrawal +4Tool Use in VLMsVideo Reasoning

  2. SoccerRef-Agents: Multi-Agent System for Automated Soccer Refereeing

    Apr 25, 2026Zi Meng, Wanli Song, Yi Hu +2Multi-Agent LLM SystemsSports Video Analysis

  3. ProcessThinker: Enhancing Multi-modal Large Language Models Reasoning via Rollout-based Process Reward

    Apr 23, 2026Jingpei Wu, Xiao Han, Weixiang Shen +3Multimodal UnderstandingMultimodal QA

  4. Neuro-Symbolic Manipulation Understanding with Enriched Semantic Event Chains

    Apr 22, 2026Fatemeh ZiaeetabarNext-Action PredictionVideo Action Recognition

  5. Video-ToC: Video Tree-of-Cue Reasoning

    Apr 22, 2026Qizhong Tan, Zhuotao Tian, Guangming Lu +2Video ReasoningVLM Reasoning

  6. SurgCoT: Advancing Spatiotemporal Reasoning in Surgical Videos through a Chain-of-Thought Benchmark

    Apr 22, 2026Gui Wang, YongSong Zhou, Kaijun Deng +4Spatiotemporal ReasoningHealthcare

  7. How Far Are Video Models from True Multimodal Reasoning?

    Apr 21, 2026Xiaotian Zhang, Jianhui Wei, Yuan Wang +9Multimodal ReasoningVideo Reasoning

  8. Find, Fix, Reason: Context Repair for Video Reasoning

    Apr 17, 2026Haojian Huang, Chuanyu Qin, Yinchuan Li +1Video ReasoningRL for Video Reasoning

  9. RefereeBench: Are Video MLLMs Ready to be Multi-Sport Referees

    Apr 17, 2026Yichen Xu, Yuanhang Liu, Chuhan Wang +5Sports Video AnalysisVideo Reasoning

  10. Chain-of-Glimpse: Search-Guided Progressive Object-Grounded Reasoning for Video Understanding

    Apr 16, 2026Zhixuan Wu, Quanxing Zha, Teng Wang +6Video ReasoningMultimodal CoT Reasoning

  11. EgoEsportsQA: An Egocentric Video Benchmark for Perception and Reasoning in Esports

    Apr 14, 2026Jianzhe Ma, Zhonghao Cao, Shangkui Chen +3Egocentric Video QAVideo QA

  12. GTASA: Ground Truth Annotations for Spatiotemporal Analysis, Evaluation and Training of Video Models

    Apr 12, 2026Nicolae Cudlenco, Mihai Masala, Marius LeordeanuSynthetic Data GenerationVideo Representation Learning

  13. SVAgent: Storyline-Guided Long Video Understanding via Cross-Modal Multi-Agent Collaboration

    Apr 6, 2026Zhongyu Yang, Zuhao Yang, Shuo Zhan +3Video QALong-Video QA

  14. When Rewards Disagree: Reward Weighting for Token-Efficient Video Reasoning

    Apr 6, 2026Zinuo Li, Yongxin Guo, Jun Liu +6Video ReasoningVLM Reasoning

  15. Reinforce to Learn, Elect to Reason: A Dual Paradigm for Video Reasoning

    Apr 6, 2026Songyuan Yang, Weijiang Yu, Jilin Ma +5Video ReasoningVLM Inference

  16. Graph-to-Frame RAG: Visual-Space Knowledge Fusion for Training-Free and Auditable Video Reasoning

    Apr 6, 2026Songyuan Yang, Weijiang Yu, Ziyu Liu +4Video ReasoningRetrieval-Augmented Generation

  17. VidNum: Diagnosing VLM Failure Modes in Video-Grounded Numerical Reasoning

    Apr 4, 2026Shaoyang Cui, Lingbei Meng, Yaodi Luo +1VLM EvaluationVideo Reasoning

  18. SGTA: Scene-Graph Based Multi-Modal Traffic Agent for Video Understanding

    Apr 4, 2026Xingcheng Zhou, Mingyu Liu, Walter Zimmer +2Video QAVisual Question Answering

  19. STRIVE: Structured Spatiotemporal Exploration for Reinforcement Learning in Video Question Answering

    Apr 2, 2026Emad Bahrami, Olga Zatsarynna, Parth Pathak +3Video QARL for Video Reasoning

  20. TTA-Vid: Generalized Test-Time Adaptation for Video Reasoning

    Apr 1, 2026Soumya Shamarao Jahagirdar, Edson Araujo, Anna Kukleva +7Test-Time AdaptationVideo Reasoning

  21. Video Models Reason Early: Exploiting Plan Commitment for Maze Solving

    Mar 31, 2026Kaleb Newman, Tyler Zhu, Olga RussakovskyVideo Diffusion ModelsVideo Reasoning

  22. Towards Automatic Soccer Commentary Generation with Knowledge-Enhanced Visual Reasoning

    Mar 31, 2026Zeyu Jin, Xiaoyu Qin, Songtao Zhou +2Grounded Text GenerationSports Video Analysis

  23. Wan-R1: Verifiable-Reinforcement Learning for Video Reasoning

    Mar 29, 2026Ming Liu, Yunbei Zhang, Shilong Liu +2RL for Video ReasoningVideo Reasoning

  24. PerceptionComp: A Video Benchmark for Complex Perception-Centric Reasoning

    Mar 27, 2026Shaoxuan Li, Zhixuan Zhao, Hanze Deng +9Video ReasoningTemporal Video Understanding

  25. Pixelis: Reasoning in Pixels, from Seeing to Acting

    Mar 26, 2026Yunpeng ZhouTool Use in VLMsVisual Reasoning

  26. LensWalk: Agentic Video Understanding by Planning How You See in Videos

    Mar 25, 2026Keliang Li, Yansong Li, Hongze Shen +3Video ReasoningTemporal Video Understanding