TOMATO: Assessing Visual Temporal Reasoning Capabilities in Multimodal
  Foundation Models
Authors: name: Ziyao Shangguan, name: Chuhan Li, name: Yuxuan Ding, name: Yanan Zheng, name: Yilun Zhao, name: Tesca Fitzgerald, name: Arman Cohan

Existing benchmarks often highlight the remarkable performance achieved by
state-of-the-art Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs) in leveraging temporal
context for video understanding. However, how well do the models truly perform
visual temporal reasoning? Our study of existing benchmarks shows that this
capability of MFMs is likely overestimated as many questions can be solved by
using a single, few, or out-of-order frames. To systematically examine current
visual temporal reasoning tasks, we propose three principles with corresponding
metrics: (1) Multi-Frame Gain, (2) Frame Order Sensitivity, and (3) Frame
Information Disparity. Following these principles, we introduce TOMATO,
Temporal Reasoning Multimodal Evaluation, a novel benchmark crafted to
rigorously assess MFMs' temporal reasoning capabilities in video understanding.
TOMATO comprises 1,484 carefully curated, human-annotated questions spanning
six tasks (i.e., action count, direction, rotation, shape & trend, velocity &
frequency, and visual cues), applied to 1,417 videos, including 805
self-recorded and -generated videos, that encompass human-centric, real-world,
and simulated scenarios. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals a human-model
performance gap of 57.3% with the best-performing model. Moreover, our in-depth
analysis uncovers more fundamental limitations beyond this gap in current MFMs.
While they can accurately recognize events in isolated frames, they fail to
interpret these frames as a continuous sequence. We believe TOMATO will serve
as a crucial testbed for evaluating the next-generation MFMs and as a call to
the community to develop AI systems capable of comprehending human world
dynamics through the video modality.