Video-Oasis: Rethinking Evaluation of Video Understanding

The inherent complexity of video understanding makes it difficult to determine whether Video-LLM benchmark performance stems from visual perception, linguistic reasoning, or knowledge priors. While many benchmarks have emerged to assess high-level reasoning, shared criteria for evaluating video understanding remain largely overlooked. Instead of introducing yet another benchmark, we take a step back to re-examine the criteria for evaluating video understanding. In this work, we introduce Video-Oasis, a sustainable diagnostic suite for systematically auditing existing video understanding benchmarks. This audit reveals that 55% of existing benchmark samples are solvable without visual input or temporal context. After filtering these shortcuts, the remaining video-native challenges expose a substantial capability gap: state-of-the-art models perform only marginally above random guessing. Building on these findings, we use the distilled challenges as a testbed to investigate which algorithmic design choices contribute to robust video understanding. We hope our work provides a practical foundation for constructing rigorous video benchmarks and evaluating future Video-LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/sejong-rcv/Video-Oasis.