# InfiniBench: A Benchmark for Large Multi-Modal Models in Long-Form Movies and TV Shows

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19875 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19875/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 25 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [NExT-QA:Next Phase of Question-Answering to Explaining Temporal Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08276/) (2021)
- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [ActivityNet-QA: A Dataset for Understanding Complex Web Videos via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02467/) (2019)
- [TVQA: Localized, Compositional Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01696/) (2018)
- [LVBench: An Extreme Long Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08035/) (2024)
- [TGIF-QA: Toward Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04497/) (2017)
- [HERO: Hierarchical Encoder for Video+Language Omni-representation Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00200/) (2020)
- [MovieNet: A Holistic Dataset for Movie Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10937/) (2020)
- [MiniGPT4-Video: Advancing Multimodal LLMs for Video Understanding with Interleaved Visual-Textual Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03413/) (2024)
- [Sample and Computation Redistribution for Efficient Face Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04714/) (2021)
- [Grounded Situation Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12058/) (2020)
- [QVHighlights: Detecting Moments and Highlights in Videos via Natural Language Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09609/) (2021)
- [Visual Semantic Role Labeling for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00990/) (2021)
- [Coherent Multi-Sentence Video Description with Variable Level of Detail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6173/) (2014)
- [CRAFT: A Benchmark for Causal Reasoning About Forces and inTeractions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04293/) (2020)
- [Video Object Grounding using Semantic Roles in Language Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10606/) (2020)
- [TRECVID 2019: An Evaluation Campaign to Benchmark Video Activity Detection, Video Captioning and Matching, and Video Search & Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09984/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [MINERVA: Evaluating Complex Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00681/) (2025)
- [Eyes Wide Open: Ego Proactive Video-LLM for Streaming Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14560/) (2025)
- [FineQuest: Adaptive Knowledge-Assisted Sports Video Understanding via Agent-of-Thoughts Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11796/) (2025)
- [A Benchmark for Omni-Modal Reasoning in Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16978/) (2025)
- [MovieRecapsQA: A Multimodal Open-Ended Video Question-Answering Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02536/) (2026)
- [SONIC-O1: A Real-World Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Audio-Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21666/) (2026)
- [WeaveTime: Stream from Earlier Frames into Emergent Memory in VideoLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22142/) (2026)
- [Probing Multimodal Large Language Models on Cognitive Biases in Chinese Short-Video Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06600/) (2026)
- [M3Eval: Multi-Modal Memory Evaluation through Cognitively-Grounded Video Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05008/) (2026)
- [Video-DeepResearch: Towards the Next-Generation Multimodal Deepresearch Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03979/) (2026)
- [Caption-once, Frames-on-Demand: Visual-Need Routing for Budget-Aware Agentic Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11899/) (2026)
- [Can Video Large Multimodal Models Think Like Doubters-or Double-Down: A Study on Defeasible Video Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22385/) (2025)
- [TraceAV-Bench: Benchmarking Multi-Hop Trajectory Reasoning over Long Audio-Visual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07593/) (2026)
- [VideoOdyssey: A Benchmark for Ultra-Long-Context and Omni-Modal Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22907/) (2026)
- [MMHBench: A Multi-Perspective Benchmark for Mental Health Understanding in Long-Form Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27895/) (2026)
- [Watching Movies Like a Human: Egocentric Emotion Understanding for Embodied Companions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15823/) (2026)
- [NEST: Narrative Event Structures in Time for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19706/) (2026)
- [DVBench: Benchmarking MLLMs for Understanding Dynamic Charts and Narratives in Data Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29711/) (2026)
- [ICM-Bench: Person-Level Identity Reasoning in Multimodal Agents with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04438/) (2026)
- [Beyond Sparse Rewards: A New Benchmark and Structure-Aware Graph Alignment for Micro-Drama Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07107/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding long-form videos, such as movies and TV episodes ranging from tens of minutes to two hours, remains a significant challenge for multi-modal models. Existing benchmarks often fail to test the full range of cognitive skills needed to process these temporally rich and narratively complex inputs. Therefore, we introduce InfiniBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of models in long video understanding rigorously. InfiniBench offers:(1) Over 1,000 hours of video content, with an average video length of 53 minutes. (2) The largest set of question-answer pairs for long video comprehension, totaling around 87.7 K. (3) Eight diverse skills that span both grounding-based (e.g., scene transitions, character actions) and reasoning-based (e.g., deep context understanding, multi-event linking). (4) Rich annotation formats, including both multiple-choice and open-ended questions. We conducted an in-depth evaluation across both commercial (GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash) and most recent open-source vision-language models such as Qwen2.5-VL, InternVL3.0). Results reveal that:(1) Models struggle across the board: Even the best model, GPT-4o, achieves only 47.1 % on grounding-based skills, with most models performing near or just above random chance. (2) Strong reliance on world knowledge: Models achieve surprisingly high scores using only metadata (e.g., video titles), highlighting a tendency to rely on pre-trained knowledge rather than actual visual or temporal understanding. (3) Multi-Modal Importance: When provided with full video and subtitle context, however, models show substantial improvements, confirming the critical role of multimodal input in video understanding. InfiniBench is publicly available at https://vision-cair.github.io/Infinibench