# TennisTV: Do Multimodal Large Language Models Understand Tennis Rallies?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15602 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15602/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 21 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21776/) (2025)
- [mPLUG-Owl3: Towards Long Image-Sequence Understanding in Multi-Modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04840/) (2024)
- [VideoChat-R1: Enhancing Spatio-Temporal Perception via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06958/) (2025)
- [FineGym: A Hierarchical Video Dataset for Fine-grained Action Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06704/) (2020)
- [InternVideo2.5: Empowering Video MLLMs with Long and Rich Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12386/) (2025)
- [SoccerNet-v2: A Dataset and Benchmarks for Holistic Understanding of Broadcast Soccer Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13367/) (2020)
- [MiMo: Unlocking the Reasoning Potential of Language Model -- From Pretraining to Posttraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07608/) (2025)
- [VideoRFT: Incentivizing Video Reasoning Capability in MLLMs via Reinforced Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12434/) (2025)
- [Sports-QA: A Large-Scale Video Question Answering Benchmark for Complex and Professional Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01505/) (2024)
- [From Seconds to Hours: Reviewing MultiModal Large Language Models on Comprehensive Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18938/) (2024)
- [SPORTU: A Comprehensive Sports Understanding Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08474/) (2024)
- [SportQA: A Benchmark for Sports Understanding in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15862/) (2024)
- [F3Set: Towards Analyzing Fast, Frequent, and Fine-grained Events from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08222/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [DeepSport: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Comprehensive Sports Video Reasoning via Agentic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12908/) (2025)
- [Watch, Remember, Reason: Human-View Video Understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07433/) (2026)
- [Learning Consistent Temporal Grounding between Related Tasks in Sports Coaching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18453/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at general video understanding but struggle with fast, high-frequency sports like tennis, where rally clips are short yet information-dense. To systematically evaluate MLLMs in this challenging domain, we present TennisTV, the first and most comprehensive benchmark for tennis video understanding. TennisTV models each rally as a temporal-ordered sequence of consecutive stroke events, using automated pipelines for filtering and question generation. It covers 8 tasks from the stroke level to the rally level and includes 2527 human-verified questions. Evaluating 17 representative MLLMs, we provide the first systematic assessment of tennis video understanding. Results yield two key insights: (i) frame-sampling density should be tailored and balanced across tasks, and (ii) improving temporal grounding is essential for stronger reasoning.