mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

How Far Are Video Models from True Multimodal Reasoning?

arXiv 2604.19193 ↗First posted 21 Apr 2026cs.CVcited by 2

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Despite remarkable progress toward general-purpose video models, a critical question remains unanswered: how far are these models from achieving true multimodal reasoning? Existing benchmarks fail to address this question rigorously, as they remain constrained by straightforward task designs and fragmented evaluation metrics that neglect complex multimodal reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce CLVG-Bench, an evaluation framework designed to probe video models' zero-shot reasoning capabilities via Context Learning in Video Generation. CLVG-Bench comprises more than 1,000 high-quality, manually annotated metadata across 6 categories and 47 subcategories, covering complex scenarios including physical simulation, logical reasoning, and interactive contexts. To enable rigorous and scalable assessment, we further propose an Adaptive Video Evaluator (AVE) that aligns with human expert perception using minimal annotations, delivering interpretable textual feedback across diverse video context tasks. Extensive experiments reveal a striking answer to our central question: while state-of-the-art (SOTA) video models, such as Seedance 2.0, demonstrate competence on certain understanding and reasoning subtasks, they fall substantially short with logically grounded and interactive generation tasks (achieving success rates <25% and ~0%, respectively), exposing multimodal reasoning and physical grounding as critical bottlenecks. By systematically quantifying these limitations, the proposed method provides actionable feedbacks and a clear roadmap toward truly robust, general-purpose video models. CLVG-Bench and code are released here.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 63 of its 83 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2026.

Builds on

63 of 83 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite23 Feb
  2. 2026Visual Generation Unlocks Human-Like Reasoning through Multimodal World Models27 Jan
  3. 2025Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners24 Sep
  4. 2025RBench-V: A Primary Assessment for Visual Reasoning Models with Multi-modal Outputs22 May

Other references · 59

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  2. 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,029
  3. 2020Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understandingcited by 7,768
  4. 2021Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformerscited by 6,893
  5. 2022Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasonerscited by 4,323
  6. 2018HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answeringcited by 3,686
  7. 2024LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfercited by 2,669
  8. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,536
  9. 2022Emergent Abilities of Large Language Modelscited by 2,483
  10. 2021CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioningcited by 2,388
  11. 2024CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformercited by 2,198
  12. 2023VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Modelscited by 1,755
38 more
  1. 2024HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Modelscited by 1,597
  2. 2016CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoningcited by 1,445
  3. 2015FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networkscited by 1,054
  4. 2024Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Modelscited by 904
  5. 2025Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretrainingcited by 855
  6. 2025Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scalingcited by 787
  7. 2024Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Needcited by 761
  8. 2024Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 734
  9. 2023ModelScope Text-to-Video Technical Reportcited by 651
  10. 2024Movie Gen: A Cast of Media Foundation Modelscited by 614
  11. 2025VideoLLaMA 3: Frontier Multimodal Foundation Models for Image and Video Understandingcited by 502
  12. 2024Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Modelcited by 468
  13. 2025VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editingcited by 467
  14. 2025GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learningcited by 449
  15. 2025Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Modelscited by 349
  16. 2023EvalCrafter: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Video Generation Modelscited by 332
  17. 2023Show-1: Marrying Pixel and Latent Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generationcited by 300
  18. 2024VideoPhy: Evaluating Physical Commonsense for Video Generationcited by 215
  19. 2026LTX-2: Efficient Joint Audio-Visual Foundation Modelcited by 213
  20. 2023Helping or Herding? Reward Model Ensembles Mitigate but do not Eliminate Reward Hackingcited by 195
  21. 2024VideoScore: Building Automatic Metrics to Simulate Fine-grained Human Feedback for Video Generationcited by 190
  22. 2024T2V-CompBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-video Generationcited by 177
  23. 2024Towards World Simulator: Crafting Physical Commonsense-Based Benchmark for Video Generationcited by 167
  24. 2024AnyV2V: A Tuning-Free Framework For Any Video-to-Video Editing Taskscited by 151
  25. 2024VisionReward: Fine-Grained Multi-Dimensional Human Preference Learning for Image and Video Generationcited by 148
  26. 2025VideoPhy-2: A Challenging Action-Centric Physical Commonsense Evaluation in Video Generationcited by 141
  27. 2023FETV: A Benchmark for Fine-Grained Evaluation of Open-Domain Text-to-Video Generationcited by 119
  28. 2025Mogao: An Omni Foundation Model for Interleaved Multi-Modal Generationcited by 108
  29. 2025Hulu-Med: A Transparent Generalist Model towards Holistic Medical Vision-Language Understandingcited by 96
  30. 2025UniVideo: Unified Understanding, Generation, and Editing for Videoscited by 85
  31. 2025Seedance 1.5 pro: A Native Audio-Visual Joint Generation Foundation Modelcited by 73
  32. 2024Instruct-Imagen: Image Generation with Multi-modal Instructioncited by 65
  33. 2024Dynamic Diffusion Transformercited by 60
  34. 2025Kling-Omni Technical Reportcited by 60
  35. 2025Video-Bench: Human-Aligned Video Generation Benchmarkcited by 53
  36. 2025UNIC: Unified In-Context Video Editingcited by 53
  37. 2025Training-Free Group Relative Policy Optimizationcited by 53
  38. 2025OpenVE-3M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-Guided Video Editingcited by 50

50 most cited of 59 All 59 (JSON)

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025SciVideoBench: Benchmarking Scientific Video Reasoning in Large Multimodal Models
  2. 2025IV-Bench: A Benchmark for Image-Grounded Video Perception and Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs
  3. 2025Video-LMM Post-Training: A Deep Dive into Video Reasoning with Large Multimodal Models
  4. 2025Can Video Large Multimodal Models Think Like Doubters-or Double-Down: A Study on Defeasible Video Entailment
  5. 2025Reasoning is All You Need for Video Generalization: A Counterfactual Benchmark with Sub-question Evaluation
  6. 2024Vinoground: Scrutinizing LMMs over Dense Temporal Reasoning with Short Videos
  7. 2025Thinking with Video: Video Generation as a Promising Multimodal Reasoning Paradigm
  8. 2025Are Video Models Ready as Zero-Shot Reasoners? An Empirical Study with the MME-CoF Benchmark