# MINERVA: Evaluating Complex Video Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00681 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00681/

## Key facts

- Cited by 32 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 32 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01798/) (2023)
- [VideoLLaMA 3: Frontier Multimodal Foundation Models for Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13106/) (2025)
- [InternVideo: General Video Foundation Models via Generative and Discriminative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03191/) (2022)
- [LVBench: An Extreme Long Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08035/) (2024)
- [ROSCOE: A Suite of Metrics for Scoring Step-by-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07919/) (2022)
- [Video-of-Thought: Step-by-Step Video Reasoning from Perception to Cognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03230/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-Critic: Learning to Evaluate Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02712/) (2024)
- [CinePile: A Long Video Question Answering Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08813/) (2024)
- [HourVideo: 1-Hour Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04998/) (2024)
- [TemporalBench: Benchmarking Fine-grained Temporal Understanding for Multimodal Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10818/) (2024)
- [LLMs cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them given the error location](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08516/) (2023)
- [Beyond Accuracy: Evaluating the Reasoning Behavior of Large Language Models -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01869/) (2024)
- [ReCEval: Evaluating Reasoning Chains via Correctness and Informativeness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10703/) (2023)
- [VideoVista: A Versatile Benchmark for Video Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11303/) (2024)
- [LLM Reasoners: New Evaluation, Library, and Analysis of Step-by-Step Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05221/) (2024)
- [E.T. Bench: Towards Open-Ended Event-Level Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18111/) (2024)
- [VideoEspresso: A Large-Scale Chain-of-Thought Dataset for Fine-Grained Video Reasoning via Core Frame Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14794/) (2024)
- [Scaling Scaling Laws with Board Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03113/) (2021)
- [On the Limitations of Reference-Free Evaluations of Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12563/) (2022)
- [Lost in Time: A New Temporal Benchmark for VideoLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07752/) (2024)
- [VideoCoT: A Video Chain-of-Thought Dataset with Active Annotation Tool](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05355/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [TimeLens: Rethinking Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14698/) (2025)
- [Seed1.8 Model Card: Towards Generalized Real-World Agency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20633/) (2026)
- [MM-CoT:A Benchmark for Probing Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08228/) (2025)
- [ReWatch-R1: Boosting Complex Video Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models through Agentic Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23652/) (2025)
- [VideoReasonBench: Can MLLMs Perform Vision-Centric Complex Video Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23359/) (2025)
- [ARGUS: Hallucination and Omission Evaluation in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07371/) (2025)
- [When Thinking Drifts: Evidential Grounding for Robust Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06077/) (2025)
- [TimeBlind: A Spatio-Temporal Compositionality Benchmark for Video LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00288/) (2026)
- [VideoChat3: Fully Open Video MLLM for Efficient and Generalist Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14935/) (2026)
- [Efficient Inference for Large Vision-Language Models: Bottlenecks, Techniques, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05546/) (2026)
- [Video-LMM Post-Training: A Deep Dive into Video Reasoning with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05034/) (2025)
- [VideoZeroBench: Probing the Limits of Video MLLMs with Spatio-Temporal Evidence Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01569/) (2026)
- [SAGE: Training Smart Any-Horizon Agents for Long Video Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13874/) (2025)
- [MOSS-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15045/) (2026)
- [HERBench: A Benchmark for Multi-Evidence Integration in Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14870/) (2025)
- [PerceptionComp: A Video Benchmark for Complex Perception-Centric Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26653/) (2026)
- [Watch, Remember, Reason: Human-View Video Understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07433/) (2026)
- [Native Active Perception as Reasoning for Omni-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19341/) (2026)
- [Video-Oasis: Rethinking Evaluation of Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29616/) (2026)
- [Video Parallel Scaling: Aggregating Diverse Frame Subsets for VideoLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08016/) (2025)
- [CRIT: Graph-Based Automatic Data Synthesis to Enhance Cross-Modal Multi-Hop Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01634/) (2026)
- [Online Video Agent Harness for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12818/) (2026)
- [MINERVA-Cultural: A Benchmark for Cultural and Multilingual Long Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10649/) (2026)
- [Towards Temporal Compositional Reasoning in Long-Form Sports Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22226/) (2026)
- [Minerva-Ego: Spatiotemporal Hints for Egocentric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15342/) (2026)
- [Act2See: Emergent Active Visual Perception for Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01657/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Large Models in Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14377/) (2026)
- [VLX-VR: An Agentic-Aware Video Reasoning Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09985/) (2026)
- [VideoScout: Learning Agentic Active Exploration with Adaptive Reasoning Pacing for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.15606/) (2026)
- [AgentVidBench: A Multi-Hop Video Question Answering Benchmark for Evaluating MLLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21386/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal LLMs are turning their focus to video benchmarks, however most video benchmarks only provide outcome supervision, with no intermediate or interpretable reasoning steps. This makes it challenging to assess if models are truly able to combine perceptual and temporal information to reason about videos, or simply get the correct answer by chance or by exploiting linguistic biases. To remedy this, we provide a new video reasoning dataset called MINERVA for modern multimodal models. Each question in the dataset comes with 5 answer choices, as well as detailed, hand-crafted reasoning traces. Our dataset is multimodal, diverse in terms of video domain and length, and consists of complex multi-step questions. Extensive benchmarking shows that our dataset provides a challenge for frontier open-source and proprietary models. We perform fine-grained error analysis to identify common failure modes across various models, and create a taxonomy of reasoning errors. We use this to explore both human and LLM-as-a-judge methods for scoring video reasoning traces, and find that failure modes are primarily related to temporal localization, followed by visual perception errors, as opposed to logical or completeness errors. The dataset, along with questions, answer candidates and reasoning traces will be publicly available under https://github.com/google-deepmind/neptune?tab=readme-ov-file#minerva.