ST-VLM: Kinematic Instruction Tuning for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in
  Vision-Language Models
Authors: name: Dohwan Ko; name: Sihyeon Kim; name: Yumin Suh; name: Vijay Kumar B. G; name: Minseo Yoon; name: Manmohan Chandraker; name: Hyunwoo J. Kim
Published: 2025-03-25 05:08:06

Abstract: Spatio-temporal reasoning is essential in understanding real-world
environments in various fields, eg, autonomous driving and sports analytics.
Recent advances have improved the spatial reasoning ability of Vision-Language
Models (VLMs) by introducing large-scale data, but these models still struggle
to analyze kinematic elements like traveled distance and speed of moving
objects. To bridge this gap, we construct a spatio-temporal reasoning dataset
and benchmark involving kinematic instruction tuning, referred to as STKit and
STKit-Bench. They consist of real-world videos with 3D annotations, detailing
object motion dynamics: traveled distance, speed, movement direction,
inter-object distance comparisons, and relative movement direction. To further
scale such data construction to videos without 3D labels, we propose an
automatic pipeline to generate pseudo-labels using 4D reconstruction in
real-world scale. With our kinematic instruction tuning data for
spatio-temporal reasoning, we present ST-VLM, a VLM enhanced for
spatio-temporal reasoning, which exhibits outstanding performance on
STKit-Bench. Furthermore, we show that ST-VLM generalizes robustly across
diverse domains and tasks, outperforming baselines on other spatio-temporal
benchmarks (eg, ActivityNet, TVQA+). Finally, by integrating learned
spatio-temporal reasoning with existing abilities, ST-VLM enables complex
multi-step reasoning. Project page: https://ikodoh.github.io/ST-VLM.