V-STaR: Benchmarking Video-LLMs on Video Spatio-Temporal Reasoning
Authors: name: Zixu Cheng; name: Jian Hu; name: Ziquan Liu; name: Chenyang Si; name: Wei Li; name: Shaogang Gong
Published: 2025-03-14 15:21:44

Abstract: Human processes video reasoning in a sequential spatio-temporal reasoning
logic, we first identify the relevant frames ("when") and then analyse the
spatial relationships ("where") between key objects, and finally leverage these
relationships to draw inferences ("what"). However, can Video Large Language
Models (Video-LLMs) also "reason through a sequential spatio-temporal logic" in
videos? Existing Video-LLM benchmarks primarily focus on assessing object
presence, neglecting relational reasoning. Consequently, it is difficult to
measure whether a model truly comprehends object interactions (actions/events)
in videos or merely relies on pre-trained "memory" of co-occurrences as biases
in generating answers. In this work, we introduce a Video Spatio-Temporal
Reasoning (V-STaR) benchmark to address these shortcomings. The key idea is to
decompose video understanding into a Reverse Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (RSTR)
task that simultaneously evaluates what objects are present, when events occur,
and where they are located while capturing the underlying Chain-of-thought
(CoT) logic. To support this evaluation, we construct a dataset to elicit the
spatial-temporal reasoning process of Video-LLMs. It contains coarse-to-fine
CoT questions generated by a semi-automated GPT-4-powered pipeline, embedding
explicit reasoning chains to mimic human cognition. Experiments from 14
Video-LLMs on our V-STaR reveal significant gaps between current Video-LLMs and
the needs for robust and consistent spatio-temporal reasoning.