Impossible Videos
Authors: name: Zechen Bai; name: Hai Ci; name: Mike Zheng Shou
Published: 2025-03-18 16:10:24

Abstract: Synthetic videos nowadays is widely used to complement data scarcity and
diversity of real-world videos. Current synthetic datasets primarily replicate
real-world scenarios, leaving impossible, counterfactual and anti-reality video
concepts underexplored. This work aims to answer two questions: 1) Can today's
video generation models effectively follow prompts to create impossible video
content? 2) Are today's video understanding models good enough for
understanding impossible videos? To this end, we introduce IPV-Bench, a novel
benchmark designed to evaluate and foster progress in video understanding and
generation. IPV-Bench is underpinned by a comprehensive taxonomy, encompassing
4 domains, 14 categories. It features diverse scenes that defy physical,
biological, geographical, or social laws. Based on the taxonomy, a prompt suite
is constructed to evaluate video generation models, challenging their prompt
following and creativity capabilities. In addition, a video benchmark is
curated to assess Video-LLMs on their ability of understanding impossible
videos, which particularly requires reasoning on temporal dynamics and world
knowledge. Comprehensive evaluations reveal limitations and insights for future
directions of video models, paving the way for next-generation video models.