# Video Evidence to Reasoning Efficient Video Understanding via Explicit Evidence Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07761 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07761/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 19 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jan 2026.

## 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, 19 of 19)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14171/) (2024)
- [CLEVRER: CoLlision Events for Video REpresentation and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01442/) (2019)
- [V*: Guided Visual Search as a Core Mechanism in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14135/) (2023)
- [Video-of-Thought: Step-by-Step Video Reasoning from Perception to Cognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03230/) (2024)
- [M-LLM Based Video Frame Selection for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19680/) (2025)
- [VideoEspresso: A Large-Scale Chain-of-Thought Dataset for Fine-Grained Video Reasoning via Core Frame Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14794/) (2024)
- [EventHallusion: Diagnosing Event Hallucinations in Video LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16597/) (2024)
- [VideoCoT: A Video Chain-of-Thought Dataset with Active Annotation Tool](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05355/) (2024)
- [VidHal: Benchmarking Temporal Hallucinations in Vision LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16771/) (2024)
- [Evidence-Grounded Trustworthy Multimodal Reasoning and Evaluation Benchmark in Complex Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09557/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) face a fundamental dilemma in video reasoning: they are caught between the prohibitive computational costs of verbose reasoning and the hallucination risks of efficient, ungrounded approaches. To resolve this, we introduce the Chain of Evidence (CoE), a novel framework that architecturally decouples and co-optimizes perceptual grounding and reasoning efficiency. CoE incorporates two core innovations: (1) A lightweight Evidence Grounding Module (EGM) that acts as a query-guided filter, dynamically identifying and extracting a compact set of high-fidelity visual evidence; and (2) An Evidence-Anchoring Protocol optimized via Reinforcement Learning. Crucially, we design a composite reward mechanism that enforces process alignment, compelling the model to strictly reference identified temporal anchors during deduction, thereby mitigating hallucinations. To enable this, we construct CoE-Instruct, a large-scale dataset (164k samples) featuring a novel dual-annotation schema for separate perception and reasoning supervision. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks, including Video-MME, MVBench, and VSI-Bench, demonstrate that CoE-enhanced models establish a new state-of-the-art. They significantly outperform existing methods in accuracy, proving CoE to be a powerful and practical paradigm for reliable video understanding.