# VidText: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation for Video Text Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22810 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22810/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01800/) (2024)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [NExT-QA:Next Phase of Question-Answering to Explaining Temporal Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08276/) (2021)
- [LongVideoBench: A Benchmark for Long-context Interleaved Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15754/) (2024)
- [VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14084/) (2021)
- [LLaMA-VID: An Image is Worth 2 Tokens in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17043/) (2023)
- [MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16449/) (2023)
- [VideoLLaMA 3: Frontier Multimodal Foundation Models for Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13106/) (2025)
- [Long Context Transfer from Language to Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16852/) (2024)
- [OCRBench: On the Hidden Mystery of OCR in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07895/) (2023)
- [LVBench: An Extreme Long Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08035/) (2024)
- [ShareGPT4Video: Improving Video Understanding and Generation with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04325/) (2024)
- [TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00476/) (2024)
- [LongVU: Spatiotemporal Adaptive Compression for Long Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17434/) (2024)
- [Scene Text Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13648/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Video-XL-2: Towards Very Long-Video Understanding Through Task-Aware KV Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19225/) (2025)
- [When Semantics Mislead Vision: Mitigating Large Multimodal Models Hallucinations in Scene Text Spotting and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05551/) (2025)
- [Yo'City: Personalized and Boundless 3D Realistic City Scene Generation via Self-Critic Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18734/) (2025)
- [Video-LMM Post-Training: A Deep Dive into Video Reasoning with Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05034/) (2025)
- [Gather and Trace: Rethinking Video TextVQA from an Instance-oriented Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04197/) (2025)
- [TimeScope: Towards Task-Oriented Temporal Grounding In Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26360/) (2025)
- [FlowScene: Style-Consistent Indoor Scene Generation with Multimodal Graph Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19598/) (2026)
- [StyleTextGen: Style-Conditioned Multilingual Scene Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14708/) (2026)
- [ViTexQA: A Multi-Frame Temporal Perception Dataset for Video Text Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24602/) (2026)
- [Beyond Detection: A Structure-Aware Framework for Scene Text Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17270/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Large Models in Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14377/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual texts embedded in videos carry rich semantic information, which is crucial for both holistic video understanding and fine-grained reasoning about local human actions. However, existing video understanding benchmarks largely overlook textual information, while OCR-specific benchmarks are constrained to static images, limiting their ability to capture the interaction between text and dynamic visual contexts. To address this gap, we propose VidText, a new benchmark designed for comprehensive and in-depth evaluation of video text understanding. VidText offers the following key features: 1) It covers a wide range of real-world scenarios and supports multilingual content, encompassing diverse settings where video text naturally appears. 2) It introduces a hierarchical evaluation framework with video-level, clip-level, and instance-level tasks, enabling assessment of both global summarization and local retrieval capabilities. 3) The benchmark also introduces a set of paired perception reasoning tasks, ranging from visual text perception to cross-modal reasoning between textual and visual information. Extensive experiments on 18 state-of-the-art Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) reveal that current models struggle across most tasks, with significant room for improvement. Further analysis highlights the impact of both model-intrinsic factors, such as input resolution and OCR capability, and external factors, including the use of auxiliary information and Chain-of-Thought reasoning strategies. We hope VidText will fill the current gap in video understanding benchmarks and serve as a foundation for future research on multimodal reasoning with video text in dynamic environments.
