Natural Language Camera Movement Understanding

Understanding camera movement in natural language is critical for training and evaluating video generation models, among other applications. However, we demonstrate that existing vision-language models (VLMs) fail this task in surprising ways, frequently confusing translation with rotation, left with right, and object movement with camera movement. To address these limitations, we establish natural language camera movement understanding as a standalone research task. We introduce a two-level cinematographic taxonomy and an extensive, atomic benchmark featuring both real and synthetic videos. Furthermore, we curate a large-scale, multi-source training set enhanced by targeted camera movement augmentation. Our fine-tuned VLM-8B outperforms Gemini 3.1 Pro by 10% and 11% on our benchmark's real and synthetic videos, respectively. Despite these gains, a significant gap remains relative to human performance, underscoring the need to promote and facilitate future research on natural language camera movement understanding.

BabyVLM-V2: Toward Developmentally Grounded Pretraining and Benchmarking of Vision Foundation Models

Early children's developmental trajectories set up a natural goal for sample-efficient pretraining of vision foundation models. We introduce BabyVLM-V2, a developmentally grounded framework for infant-inspired vision-language modeling that extensively improves upon BabyVLM-V1 through a longitudinal, multifaceted pretraining set, a versatile model, and, most importantly, DevCV Toolbox for cognitive evaluation. The pretraining set maximizes coverage while minimizing curation of a longitudinal, infant-centric audiovisual corpus, yielding video-utterance, image-utterance, and multi-turn conversational data that mirror infant experiences. DevCV Toolbox adapts all vision-related measures of the recently released NIH Baby Toolbox into a benchmark suite of ten multimodal tasks, covering spatial reasoning, memory, and vocabulary understanding aligned with early children's capabilities. Experimental results show that a compact model pretrained from scratch can achieve competitive performance on DevCV Toolbox, outperforming GPT-4o on some tasks. We hope the principled, unified BabyVLM-V2 framework will accelerate research in developmentally plausible pretraining of vision foundation models.