Paper Detail

Grounding Video Reasoning in Physical Signals

Alibay Osmanli, Zixu Cheng, Shaogang Gong

arxiv Score 10.3

Published 2026-04-23 · First seen 2026-04-24

General AI

Abstract

Physical video understanding requires more than naming an event correctly. A model can answer a question about pouring, sliding, or collision from textual regularities while still failing to localize the event in time or space. We introduce a grounded benchmark for physical video understanding that extends the what--when--where evaluation structure of V-STaR to four video sources, six physics domains, three prompt families (physics, vstar_like, and neutral_rstr), and four input conditions (original, shuffled, ablated, and frame-masked). The benchmark contains 1,560 base video clips from SSV2, YouCook2, HoloAssist, and Roundabout-TAU. Each clip is first converted into a shared grounded event record, and the three query families are derived from that record. Temporal and spatial targets are shared across prompt families, while the non-physics families use deterministic family-appropriate semantic a_what targets derived from the same record. Across models and prompt families, physics remains the strongest regime overall, vstar_like is the clearest non-physics semantic comparison, and neutral_rstr behaves as a harder templated control. Prompt-family robustness is selective rather than universal, perturbation gains cluster in weak original cases, and spatial grounding is the weakest across settings. These results suggest that video Q&A reasoning benchmarks shall report physically grounded, prompt-aware, and perturbation-aware diagnostics alongside aggregate accuracy.

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BibTeX

@article{osmanli2026grounding,
  title = {Grounding Video Reasoning in Physical Signals},
  author = {Alibay Osmanli and Zixu Cheng and Shaogang Gong},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Physical video understanding requires more than naming an event correctly. A model can answer a question about pouring, sliding, or collision from textual regularities while still failing to localize the event in time or space. We introduce a grounded benchmark for physical video understanding that extends the what--when--where evaluation structure of V-STaR to four video sources, six physics domains, three prompt families (physics, vstar\_like, and neutral\_rstr), and four input conditions (origi},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21873},
  keywords = {cs.CV},
  eprint = {2604.21873},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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