MINERVA: Evaluating Complex Video Reasoning

Multimodal LLMs are turning their focus to video benchmarks, however most video benchmarks only provide outcome supervision, with no intermediate or interpretable reasoning steps. This makes it challenging to assess if models are truly able to combine perceptual and temporal information to reason about videos, or simply get the correct answer by chance or by exploiting linguistic biases. To remedy this, we provide a new video reasoning dataset called MINERVA for modern multimodal models. Each question in the dataset comes with 5 answer choices, as well as detailed, hand-crafted reasoning traces. Our dataset is multimodal, diverse in terms of video domain and length, and consists of complex multi-step questions. Extensive benchmarking shows that our dataset provides a challenge for frontier open-source and proprietary models. We perform fine-grained error analysis to identify common failure modes across various models, and create a taxonomy of reasoning errors. We use this to explore both human and LLM-as-a-judge methods for scoring video reasoning traces, and find that failure modes are primarily related to temporal localization, followed by visual perception errors, as opposed to logical or completeness errors. The dataset, along with questions, answer candidates and reasoning traces will be publicly available under https://github.com/google-deepmind/neptune?tab=readme-ov-file\#minerva.

Neptune: The Long Orbit to Benchmarking Long Video Understanding

This paper describes a semi-automatic pipeline to generate challenging question-answer-decoy sets for understanding long videos. Many existing video datasets and models are focused on short clips (10s-30s). While some long video datasets do exist, they can often be solved by powerful image models applied per frame (and often to very few frames) in a video, and are usually manually annotated at high cost. In order to mitigate both these problems, we propose a scalable dataset creation pipeline which leverages large models (VLMs and LLMs), to automatically generate dense, time-aligned video captions, as well as tough question answer decoy sets for video segments (up to 15 minutes in length). Our dataset Neptune covers a broad range of long video reasoning abilities and consists of a subset that emphasizes multimodal reasoning. Since existing metrics for open-ended question answering are either rule-based or may rely on proprietary models, we provide a new open source model-based metric GEM to score open-ended responses on Neptune. Benchmark evaluations reveal that most current open-source long video models perform poorly on Neptune, particularly on questions testing temporal ordering, counting and state changes. Through Neptune, we aim to spur the development of more advanced models capable of understanding long videos. The dataset is available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/neptune

Multimodal active speaker detection and virtual cinematography for video conferencing

Active speaker detection (ASD) and virtual cinematography (VC) can significantly improve the remote user experience of a video conference by automatically panning, tilting and zooming of a video conferencing camera: users subjectively rate an expert video cinematographer's video significantly higher than unedited video. We describe a new automated ASD and VC that performs within 0.3 MOS of an expert cinematographer based on subjective ratings with a 1-5 scale. This system uses a 4K wide-FOV camera, a depth camera, and a microphone array; it extracts features from each modality and trains an ASD using an AdaBoost machine learning system that is very efficient and runs in real-time. A VC is similarly trained using machine learning to optimize the subjective quality of the overall experience. To avoid distracting the room participants and reduce switching latency the system has no moving parts -- the VC works by cropping and zooming the 4K wide-FOV video stream. The system was tuned and evaluated using extensive crowdsourcing techniques and evaluated on a dataset with N=100 meetings, each 2-5 minutes in length.