# AnyGroundBench: A Specialized-Domain Benchmark for Video Grounding in Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02269 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02269/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 73 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
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- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [OpenAI GPT-5 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03267/) (2025)
- [An Explanation of In-context Learning as Implicit Bayesian Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02080/) (2021)
- [DoRA: Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09353/) (2024)
- [Learning To Retrieve Prompts for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08633/) (2021)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02101/) (2017)
- [Real-world Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04264/) (2018)
- [GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19457/) (2025)
- [AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08421/) (2017)
- [TimeChat: A Time-sensitive Multimodal Large Language Model for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02051/) (2023)
- [InternVideo2: Scaling Foundation Models for Multimodal Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15377/) (2024)
- [MLVU: Benchmarking Multi-task Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04264/) (2024)
- [VTimeLLM: Empower LLM to Grasp Video Moments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18445/) (2023)
- [MeViS: A Large-scale Benchmark for Video Segmentation with Motion Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08544/) (2023)
- [FutureSightDrive: Thinking Visually with Spatio-Temporal CoT for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17685/) (2025)
- [Can I Trust Your Answer? Visually Grounded Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01327/) (2023)
- [Where Does It Exist: Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding for Multi-Form Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06891/) (2020)
- [Animal Kingdom: A Large and Diverse Dataset for Animal Behavior Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08129/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG), yet they are still evaluated mostly in a zero-shot manner on general-purpose benchmarks of everyday scenes. This creates a critical disconnect from real-world applications in specialized domains, where models inevitably encounter rare visual or textual concepts. Since exhaustive pre-training across infinite data distributions is infeasible, the ability to adapt to novel domains with limited data is essential. To bridge this gap, we introduce AnyGroundBench, a domain-adaptation benchmark designed to shift the STVG evaluation paradigm from static zero-shot testing to rigorous domain adaptation. Targeting five specialized domains (animal, industry, sports, surgery, and public security), AnyGroundBench pairs newly captured, expert-annotated videos with established datasets, unifying them through dense, high-fidelity spatio-temporal annotations. Crucially, the benchmark provides dedicated limited training subsets, enabling systematic evaluation of domain adaptability under limited training data. We benchmark 23 state-of-the-art VLMs in the zero-shot setting and further evaluate five adaptation strategies, spanning training-free and fine-tuning-based approaches, on representative models, assessing their zero-shot generalization and adaptation capacity. Our results show that current VLMs remain far from practical performance in the zero-shot setting, that training-free adaptation produces highly variable effects depending on the model and domain, and that fine-tuning-based adaptation, though more effective, still falls short of real-world requirements, with gains varying markedly across domains. These findings expose fundamental limitations in current VLMs' spatio-temporal reasoning, pointing to concrete directions for future research.