TVBench: Redesigning Video-Language Evaluation
Authors: name: Daniel Cores, name: Michael Dorkenwald, name: Manuel Mucientes, name: Cees G. M. Snoek, name: Yuki M. Asano

Large language models have demonstrated impressive performance when
integrated with vision models even enabling video understanding. However,
evaluating these video models presents its own unique challenges, for which
several benchmarks have been proposed. In this paper, we show that the
currently most used video-language benchmarks can be solved without requiring
much temporal reasoning. We identified three main issues in existing datasets:
(i) static information from single frames is often sufficient to solve the
tasks (ii) the text of the questions and candidate answers is overly
informative, allowing models to answer correctly without relying on any visual
input (iii) world knowledge alone can answer many of the questions, making the
benchmarks a test of knowledge replication rather than visual reasoning. In
addition, we found that open-ended question-answering benchmarks for video
understanding suffer from similar issues while the automatic evaluation process
with LLMs is unreliable, making it an unsuitable alternative. As a solution, we
propose TVBench, a novel open-source video multiple-choice question-answering
benchmark, and demonstrate through extensive evaluations that it requires a
high level of temporal understanding. Surprisingly, we find that most recent
state-of-the-art video-language models perform similarly to random performance
on TVBench, with only Gemini-Pro and Tarsier clearly surpassing this baseline.