How Far Are Video Models from True Multimodal Reasoning?

Despite remarkable progress toward general-purpose video models, a critical question remains unanswered: how far are these models from achieving true multimodal reasoning? Existing benchmarks fail to address this question rigorously, as they remain constrained by straightforward task designs and fragmented evaluation metrics that neglect complex multimodal reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce CLVG-Bench, an evaluation framework designed to probe video models' zero-shot reasoning capabilities via Context Learning in Video Generation. CLVG-Bench comprises more than 1,000 high-quality, manually annotated metadata across 6 categories and 47 subcategories, covering complex scenarios including physical simulation, logical reasoning, and interactive contexts. To enable rigorous and scalable assessment, we further propose an Adaptive Video Evaluator (AVE) that aligns with human expert perception using minimal annotations, delivering interpretable textual feedback across diverse video context tasks. Extensive experiments reveal a striking answer to our central question: while state-of-the-art (SOTA) video models, such as Seedance 2.0, demonstrate competence on certain understanding and reasoning subtasks, they fall substantially short with logically grounded and interactive generation tasks (achieving success rates <25% and ~0%, respectively), exposing multimodal reasoning and physical grounding as critical bottlenecks. By systematically quantifying these limitations, the proposed method provides actionable feedbacks and a clear roadmap toward truly robust, general-purpose video models. CLVG-Bench and code are released here.

Value-Guidance MeanFlow for Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) aims to learn the optimal joint policy from pre-collected datasets, requiring a trade-off between maximizing global returns and mitigating distribution shift from offline data. Recent studies use diffusion or flow generative models to capture complex joint policy behaviors among agents; however, they typically rely on multi-step iterative sampling, thereby reducing training and inference efficiency. Although further research improves sampling efficiency through methods like distillation, it remains sensitive to the behavior regularization coefficient. To address the above-mentioned issues, we propose Value Guidance Multi-agent MeanFlow Policy (VGM$^2$P), a simple yet effective flow-based policy learning framework that enables efficient action generation with coefficient-insensitive conditional behavior cloning. Specifically, VGM$^2$P uses global advantage values to guide agent collaboration, treating optimal policy learning as conditional behavior cloning. Additionally, to improve policy expressiveness and inference efficiency in multi-agent scenarios, it leverages classifier-free guidance MeanFlow for both policy training and execution. Experiments on tasks with both discrete and continuous action spaces demonstrate that, even when trained solely via conditional behavior cloning, VGM$^2$P efficiently achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods.

Learning Transferable Temporal Primitives for Video Reasoning via Synthetic Videos

The transition from image to video understanding requires vision-language models (VLMs) to shift from recognizing static patterns to reasoning over temporal dynamics such as motion trajectories, speed changes, and state transitions. Yet current post-training methods fall short due to two critical limitations: (1) existing datasets often lack temporal-centricity, where answers can be inferred from isolated keyframes rather than requiring holistic temporal integration; and (2) training data generated by proprietary models contains systematic errors in fundamental temporal perception, such as confusing motion directions or misjudging speeds. We introduce SynRL, a post-training framework that teaches models temporal primitives, the fundamental building blocks of temporal understanding including direction, speed, and state tracking. Our key insight is that these abstract primitives, learned from programmatically generated synthetic videos, transfer effectively to real-world scenarios. We decompose temporal understanding into short-term perceptual primitives (speed, direction) and long-term cognitive primitives, constructing 7.7K CoT and 7K RL samples with ground-truth frame-level annotations through code-based video generation. Despite training on simple geometric shapes, SynRL achieves substantial improvements across 15 benchmarks spanning temporal grounding, complex reasoning, and general video understanding. Remarkably, our 7.7K synthetic CoT samples outperform Video-R1 with 165K real-world samples. We attribute this to fundamental temporal skills, such as tracking frame by frame changes and comparing velocity, that transfer effectively from abstract synthetic patterns to complex real-world scenarios. This establishes a new paradigm for video post-training: video temporal learning through carefully designed synthetic data provides a more cost efficient scaling path.

GPT4o-Receipt: A Dataset and Human Study for AI-Generated Document Forensics

Can humans detect AI-generated financial documents better than machines? We present GPT4o-Receipt, a benchmark of 1,235 receipt images pairing GPT-4o-generated receipts with authentic ones from established datasets, evaluated by five state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs and a 30-annotator crowdsourced perceptual study. Our findings reveal a striking paradox: humans are better at seeing AI artifacts, yet worse at detecting AI documents. Human annotators exhibit the largest visual discrimination gap of any evaluator, yet their binary detection F1 falls well below Claude Sonnet 4 and below Gemini 2.5 Flash. This paradox resolves once the mechanism is understood: the dominant forensic signals in AI-generated receipts are arithmetic errors -- invisible to visual inspection but systematically verifiable by LLMs. Humans cannot perceive that a subtotal is incorrect; LLMs verify it in milliseconds. Beyond the human--LLM comparison, our five-model evaluation reveals dramatic performance disparities and calibration differences that render simple accuracy metrics insufficient for detector selection. GPT4o-Receipt, the evaluation framework, and all results are released publicly to support future research in AI document forensics.

Bilevel Layer-Positioning LoRA for Real Image Dehazing

Learning-based real image dehazing methods have achieved notable progress, yet they still face adaptation challenges in diverse real haze scenes. These challenges mainly stem from the lack of effective unsupervised mechanisms for unlabeled data and the heavy cost of full model fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we propose the haze-to-clear text-directed loss that leverages CLIP's cross-modal capabilities to reformulate real image dehazing as a semantic alignment problem in latent space, thereby providing explicit unsupervised cross-modal guidance in the absence of reference images. Furthermore, we introduce the Bilevel Layer-positioning LoRA (BiLaLoRA) strategy, which learns both the LoRA parameters and automatically search the injection layers, enabling targeted adaptation of critical network layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superiority against state-of-the-art methods on multiple real-world dehazing benchmarks. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/YanZhang-zy/BiLaLoRA.

Automated Thematic Analysis for Clinical Qualitative Data: Iterative Codebook Refinement with Full Provenance

Thematic analysis (TA) is widely used in health research to extract patterns from patient interviews, yet manual TA faces challenges in scalability and reproducibility. LLM-based automation can help, but existing approaches produce codebooks with limited generalizability and lack analytic auditability. We present an automated TA framework combining iterative codebook refinement with full provenance tracking. Evaluated on five corpora spanning clinical interviews, social media, and public transcripts, the framework achieves the highest composite quality score on four of five datasets compared to six baselines. Iterative refinement yields statistically significant improvements on four datasets with large effect sizes, driven by gains in code reusability and distributional consistency while preserving descriptive quality. On two clinical corpora (pediatric cardiology), generated themes align with expert-annotated themes.

DOCFORGE-BENCH: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Document Forgery Detection and Analysis

We present DOCFORGE-BENCH, the first unified zero-shot benchmark for document forgery detection, evaluating 14 methods across eight datasets spanning text tampering, receipt forgery, and identity document manipulation. Unlike fine-tuning-oriented evaluations such as ForensicHub [Du et al., 2025], DOCFORGE-BENCH applies all methods with their published pretrained weights and no domain adaptation -- a deliberate design choice that reflects the realistic deployment scenario where practitioners lack labeled document training data. Our central finding is a pervasive calibration failure invisible under single-threshold protocols: methods achieve moderate Pixel-AUC (>=0.76) yet near-zero Pixel-F1. This AUC-F1 gap is not a discrimination failure but a score-distribution shift: tampered regions occupy only 0.27-4.17% of pixels in document images -- an order of magnitude less than in natural image benchmarks -- making the standard tau=0.5 threshold catastrophically miscalibrated. Oracle-F1 is 2-10x higher than fixed-threshold Pixel-F1, confirming that calibration, not representation, is the bottleneck. A controlled calibration experiment validates this: adapting a single threshold on N=10 domain images recovers 39-55% of the Oracle-F1 gap, demonstrating that threshold adaptation -- not retraining -- is the key missing step for practical deployment. Overall, no evaluated method works reliably out-of-the-box on diverse document types, underscoring that document forgery detection remains an unsolved problem. We further note that all eight datasets predate the era of generative AI editing; benchmarks covering diffusion- and LLM-based document forgeries represent a critical open gap on the modern attack surface.

SSKG Hub: An Expert-Guided Platform for LLM-Empowered Sustainability Standards Knowledge Graphs

Sustainability disclosure standards (e.g., GRI, SASB, TCFD, IFRS S2) are comprehensive yet lengthy, terminology-dense, and highly cross-referential, hindering structured analysis and downstream use. We present SSKG Hub (Sustainability Standards Knowledge Graph Hub), a research prototype and interactive web platform that transforms standards into auditable knowledge graphs (KGs) through an LLM-centered, expert-guided pipeline. The system integrates automatic standard identification, configurable chunking, standard-specific prompting, robust triple parsing, and provenance-aware Neo4j storage with fine-grained audit metadata. LLM extraction produces a provenance-linked Draft KG, which is reviewed, curated, and formally promoted to a Certified KG through meta-expert adjudication. A role-based governance framework covering read-only guest access, expert review and CRUD operations, meta-expert certification, and administrative oversight ensures traceability and accountability across draft and certified states. Beyond graph exploration and triple-level evidence tracing, SSKG Hub supports cross-KG fusion, KG-driven tasks, and dedicated modules for insights and curated resources. We validate the platform through a comprehensive expert-led KG review case study that demonstrates end-to-end curation and quality assurance. The web application is publicly available at www.sskg-hub.com.

Wavelet-based Frame Selection by Detecting Semantic Boundary for Long Video Understanding

Frame selection is crucial due to high frame redundancy and limited context windows when applying Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to long videos. Current methods typically select frames with high relevance to a given query, resulting in a disjointed set of frames that disregard the narrative structure of video. In this paper, we introduce Wavelet-based Frame Selection by Detecting Semantic Boundary (WFS-SB), a training-free framework that presents a new perspective: effective video understanding hinges not only on high relevance but, more importantly, on capturing semantic shifts - pivotal moments of narrative change that are essential to comprehending the holistic storyline of video. However, direct detection of abrupt changes in the query-frame similarity signal is often unreliable due to high-frequency noise arising from model uncertainty and transient visual variations. To address this, we leverage the wavelet transform, which provides an ideal solution through its multi-resolution analysis in both time and frequency domains. By applying this transform, we decompose the noisy signal into multiple scales and extract a clean semantic change signal from the coarsest scale. We identify the local extrema of this signal as semantic boundaries, which segment the video into coherent clips. Building on this, WFS-SB comprises a two-stage strategy: first, adaptively allocating a frame budget to each clip based on a composite importance score; and second, within each clip, employing the Maximal Marginal Relevance approach to select a diverse yet relevant set of frames. Extensive experiments show that WFS-SB significantly boosts LVLM performance, e.g., improving accuracy by 5.5% on VideoMME, 9.5% on MLVU, and 6.2% on LongVideoBench, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

UniVBench: Towards Unified Evaluation for Video Foundation Models

Video foundation models aim to integrate video understanding, generation, editing, and instruction following within a single framework, making them a central direction for next-generation multimodal systems. However, existing evaluation benchmarks remain fragmented and limited in scope, as they each target a single task, rely on task-specific metrics, and typically use short or simple video clips. As a result, they do not capture the unified capabilities that these models are designed to deliver. To address this gap, we introduce UniVBench, a benchmark purpose-built for evaluating video foundation models across four core abilities: video understanding, video generation, video editing, and a newly proposed task, video reconstruction, which assesses how faithfully a model can reproduce video content it has encountered. Our benchmark substantially expands the complexity of evaluation by incorporating 200 high-quality, diverse and multi-shot videos, each paired with detailed captions, multi-format editing instructions, and reference images. All videos are human-created and carefully validated, offering richer cinematic information than prior benchmarks. In addition, we develop a unified agentic evaluation system (UniV-Eval) that standardizes prompting, instruction parsing, and scoring across all tasks, enabling fair, scalable, and reproducible comparisons of unified video models. By grounding evaluation in instruction-based multi-shot video tasks, UniVBench provides the first framework for measuring the integrated capabilities that video foundation models aim to achieve. Extensive human annotations ensure our evaluation aligns with human judgment, enabling rigorous assessment and accelerating progress toward robust video intelligence.