Not Another Text Benchmark: Putting the "Visual" Back in Visual Question Answering for Large Video Models

Large video models have exhibited impressive performance on a wide range of visual question answering tasks, owing to the rise of powerful, pretrained text and vision encoders. The usefulness of such models have also been demonstrated on a wide range of benchmarks, with an important caveat - the dominant approach in these benchmarks evaluates multiple choice reasoning via text options. This is a natural way to test text-based reasoning in these models, and has led to significant insights regarding model behavior in the community. In this work, we ask a different question - what happens when the evaluation modality is visual, rather than text? We introduce three new vision-centric evaluation benchmarks in temporal frame retrieval, video future prediction, and causal memory distortion, all designed around evaluating visual understanding capabilities in large video models. Our approach complements the existing approaches to evaluate video understanding in frontier models. We show that current frontier models exhibit significant weakness when attempting to reason through visual queries, rather than text. We conclude with an extended analysis section that provides pointers for future improvements in visual understanding for large video models.