# Video-HOCA: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Physical Anomaly Reasoning in Video-LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19571 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19571/

## 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 0 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Video-HOCA, a diagnostic benchmark for physical anomaly reasoning in videos. Video-HOCA uses an Ontological-Causal taxonomy to distinguish violations of an entity's own properties or capabilities from violations of physical relations among entities and the environment. It contains more than 1,400 generated and real-world videos and 3,470 question-answer pairs, with human verification of labels and reference answers. The benchmark evaluates four levels of reasoning: plausibility checking, anomaly attribution, fine-grained recognition, and open-ended physical explanation. Across 20 Instruct-mode Video-LLMs, we find that recognition outpaces explanation: Task I scores cluster at 75-88, while Task II macro-F1 stays mostly below 50. We also find that the Ontological-Causal gap depends on the task and model configuration, and that Thinking-mode gains are not explained by sampling or output budget alone. Annotation agreement, Task-IV human-judge and judge-judge checks, alternative metrics, and temporal/decoding controls validate the evaluation pipeline and bound the claims supported by the benchmark.