# LeAdQA: LLM-Driven Context-Aware Temporal Grounding for Video Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14784 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14784/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [NExT-QA:Next Phase of Question-Answering to Explaining Temporal Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08276/) (2021)
- [TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02101/) (2017)
- [TVQA: Localized, Compositional Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01696/) (2018)
- [InternVideo: General Video Foundation Models via Generative and Discriminative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03191/) (2022)
- [VideoAgent: Long-form Video Understanding with Large Language Model as Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10517/) (2024)
- [Learning 2D Temporal Adjacent Networks for Moment Localization with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03590/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Question-Image Co-Attention for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00061/) (2016)
- [VideoTree: Adaptive Tree-based Video Representation for LLM Reasoning on Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19209/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Video Question Answering via Frozen Bidirectional Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08155/) (2022)
- [Learning Video Representations from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04501/) (2022)
- [Self-Chained Image-Language Model for Video Localization and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06988/) (2023)
- [UniVTG: Towards Unified Video-Language Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16715/) (2023)
- [A Simple LLM Framework for Long-Range Video Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17235/) (2023)
- [Query-Dependent Video Representation for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13874/) (2023)
- [Video-of-Thought: Step-by-Step Video Reasoning from Perception to Cognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03230/) (2024)
- [Tarsier: Recipes for Training and Evaluating Large Video Description Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00634/) (2024)
- [Can I Trust Your Answer? Visually Grounded Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01327/) (2023)
- [An Image Grid Can Be Worth a Video: Zero-shot Video Question Answering Using a VLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18406/) (2024)
- [Video ReCap: Recursive Captioning of Hour-Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13250/) (2024)
- [TRACE: Temporal Grounding Video LLM via Causal Event Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05643/) (2024)
- [An Empirical Study of End-to-End Video-Language Transformers with Masked Visual Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01540/) (2022)
- [MoReVQA: Exploring Modular Reasoning Models for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06511/) (2024)
- [Invariant Grounding for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02349/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Image-to-Video Transfer Learning based on Image-Language Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10671/) (2025)
- [VTI-CoT: Visual-Textual Interleaved Chain of Thought for Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05736/) (2026)
- [UpstreamQA: A Modular Framework for Explicit Reasoning on Video Question Answering Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23145/) (2026)
- [Counterfactual Reasoning for Fine-Grained Evidence Disentanglement in VideoQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09181/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) requires identifying sparse critical moments in long videos and reasoning about their causal relationships to answer semantically complex questions. While recent advances in multimodal learning have improved alignment and fusion, current approaches remain limited by two prevalent but fundamentally flawed strategies: (1) task-agnostic sampling indiscriminately processes all frames, overwhelming key events with irrelevant content; and (2) heuristic retrieval captures superficial patterns but misses causal-temporal structures needed for complex reasoning. To address these challenges, we introduce LeAdQA, an innovative approach that bridges these gaps through synergizing causal-aware query refinement with fine-grained visual grounding. Our method first leverages LLMs to reformulate question-option pairs, resolving causal ambiguities and sharpening temporal focus. These refined queries subsequently direct a temporal grounding model to precisely retrieve the most salient segments, complemented by an adaptive fusion mechanism dynamically integrating the evidence to maximize relevance. The integrated visual-textual cues are then processed by an MLLM to generate accurate, contextually-grounded answers. Experiments on NExT-QA, IntentQA, and NExT-GQA demonstrate that our method's precise visual grounding substantially enhances the understanding of video-question relationships, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on complex reasoning tasks while maintaining computational efficiency.