# Rethinking Visual Intelligence: Insights from Video Pretraining

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24448/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 22 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05638/) (2022)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [Movie Gen: A Cast of Media Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13720/) (2024)
- [LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00103/) (2024)
- [Phenaki: Variable Length Video Generation From Open Domain Textual Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02399/) (2022)
- [LoraHub: Efficient Cross-Task Generalization via Dynamic LoRA Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13269/) (2023)
- [Visual Prompting via Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00647/) (2022)
- [On the Measure of Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01547/) (2019)
- [ARC Prize 2024: Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04604/) (2024)
- [LoRA Soups: Merging LoRAs for Practical Skill Composition Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13025/) (2024)
- [DICEPTION: A Generalist Diffusion Model for Visual Perceptual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17157/) (2025)
- [RealGeneral: Unifying Visual Generation via Temporal In-Context Learning with Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10406/) (2025)

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

- [ARC Prize 2025: Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10904/) (2026)
- [Visual prompt engineering for video models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25537/) (2026)
- [World Model Self-Distillation: Training World Models to Solve General Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12072/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that large-scale pretraining enables systems to adapt rapidly to new problems with little supervision in the language domain. This success, however, has not translated as effectively to the visual domain, where models, including LLMs, continue to struggle with compositional understanding, sample efficiency, and general-purpose problem-solving. We investigate Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) as a promising direction for bridging this gap. Pretraining on spatiotemporal data endows these models with strong inductive biases for structure and dynamics, which we hypothesize can support broad task adaptability. To test this, we design a controlled evaluation in which both a pretrained LLM and a pretrained VDM are equipped with lightweight adapters and presented with tasks in their natural modalities. Across benchmarks including ARC-AGI, ConceptARC, visual games, route planning, and cellular automata, VDMs demonstrate higher data efficiency than their language counterparts. Taken together, our results indicate that video pretraining offers inductive biases that support progress toward visual foundation models.