# ThinkV2V: Unleashing the Reasoning Capability of MLLMs for Instruction-Guided Video Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38541 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38541/

## 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 33 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07598/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10440/) (2024)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [ImgEdit: A Unified Image Editing Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20275/) (2025)
- [Mastering Text-to-Image Diffusion: Recaptioning, Planning, and Generating with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11708/) (2024)
- [UniVideo: Unified Understanding, Generation, and Editing for Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08377/) (2025)
- [Scaling Instruction-Based Video Editing with a High-Quality Synthetic Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15742/) (2025)
- [InsViE-1M: Effective Instruction-based Video Editing with Elaborate Dataset Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20287/) (2025)
- [OpenVE-3M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-Guided Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07826/) (2025)
- [Omni-Video: Democratizing Unified Video Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06119/) (2025)
- [Kiwi-Edit: Versatile Video Editing via Instruction and Reference Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02175/) (2026)
- [In-Context Learning with Unpaired Clips for Instruction-based Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14648/) (2025)
- [VChain: Chain-of-Visual-Thought for Reasoning in Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05094/) (2025)
- [InstructX: Towards Unified Visual Editing with MLLM Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08485/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Study of GPT-4o Image Generation Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05979/) (2025)
- [X2Edit: Revisiting Arbitrary-Instruction Image Editing through Self-Constructed Data and Task-Aware Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07607/) (2025)
- [Region-Constraint In-Context Generation for Instructional Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17650/) (2025)
- [MagicTailor: Component-Controllable Personalization in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13370/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Physical Plausibility in Video Generation by Reasoning the Implausibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24702/) (2025)
- [BLINK-Twice: You see, but do you observe? A Reasoning Benchmark on Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09361/) (2025)
- [SAMA: Factorized Semantic Anchoring and Motion Alignment for Instruction-Guided Video Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19228/) (2026)
- [OmniShow: Unifying Multimodal Conditions for Human-Object Interaction Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11804/) (2026)
- [SceneDecorator: Towards Scene-Oriented Story Generation with Scene Planning and Scene Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22994/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Instruction-guided video editing has made significant progress, yet existing methods use multimodal large language models (MLLMs) primarily as semantic encoders, so they often fall short in working with implicit edits that require causal or semantic reasoning. To bridge this fundamental gap in video editing, we propose ThinkV2V, a reasoning-driven framework for complex instruction-guided video editing, explicitly activating MLLM thinking before visual generation. At its core, ThinkV2V builds on a practical MLLM-to-DiT architecture to turn explicit thinking over the source video and instruction into refined conditioning signals for video editing. Further, we equip it with a dedicated training and inference recipe, combining Progressive Curriculum Training, which gradually cultivates the model from basic editing to reasoning-intensive cases, with Inference-Time Thinking Scaling, which iteratively refines candidate prompts and selects the most reliable one, to better elicit reasoning in challenging editing scenarios. We also curate the ThinkV2V-150K dataset and introduce ThinkV2V-Bench to support training and evaluation of video editing with implicit intent and causal reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of ThinkV2V on both complex and standard editing scenarios, in which our 5B-scale DiT model substantially outperforms larger 10B-scale baselines.