VCR-Bench: A Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Video
  Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Authors: name: Yukun Qi; name: Yiming Zhao; name: Yu Zeng; name: Xikun Bao; name: Wenxuan Huang; name: Lin Chen; name: Zehui Chen; name: Jie Zhao; name: Zhongang Qi; name: Feng Zhao
Published: 2025-04-10 17:59:03

Abstract: The advancement of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly
enhanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and large
vision-language models (LVLMs). However, a rigorous evaluation framework for
video CoT reasoning remains absent. Current video benchmarks fail to adequately
assess the reasoning process and expose whether failures stem from deficiencies
in perception or reasoning capabilities. Therefore, we introduce VCR-Bench, a
novel benchmark designed to comprehensively evaluate LVLMs' Video
Chain-of-Thought Reasoning capabilities. VCR-Bench comprises 859 videos
spanning a variety of video content and durations, along with 1,034
high-quality question-answer pairs. Each pair is manually annotated with a
stepwise CoT rationale, where every step is tagged to indicate its association
with the perception or reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, we design seven
distinct task dimensions and propose the CoT score to assess the entire CoT
process based on the stepwise tagged CoT rationals. Extensive experiments on
VCR-Bench highlight substantial limitations in current LVLMs. Even the
top-performing model, o1, only achieves a 62.8% CoT score and an 56.7%
accuracy, while most models score below 40%. Experiments show most models score
lower on perception than reasoning steps, revealing LVLMs' key bottleneck in
temporal-spatial information processing for complex video reasoning. A robust
positive correlation between the CoT score and accuracy confirms the validity
of our evaluation framework and underscores the critical role of CoT reasoning
in solving complex video reasoning tasks. We hope VCR-Bench to serve as a
standardized evaluation framework and expose the actual drawbacks in complex
video reasoning task.