Jinqiang Li


2025

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Reasoning is All You Need for Video Generalization: A Counterfactual Benchmark with Sub-question Evaluation
Qiji Zhou | YiFan Gong | Guangsheng Bao | Hongjie Qiu | Jinqiang Li | Xiangrong Zhu | Huajian Zhang | Yue Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

Counterfactual reasoning is crucial for robust video understanding but remains underexplored in existing multimodal benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce **COVER** (**CO**unterfactual **V**id**E**o **R**easoning), a multidimensional multimodal benchmark that systematically evaluates MLLMs across the abstract-concrete and perception-cognition dimensions. Beyond prior multimodal benchmarks, COVER decomposes complex queries into structured sub-questions, enabling fine-grained reasoning analysis. Experiments on commercial and open-source models reveal a strong correlation between sub-question accuracy and counterfactual reasoning performance, highlighting the role of structured inference in video understanding. Furthermore, our results suggest a key insight: enhancing the reasoning capability of models is essential for improving the robustness of video understanding. COVER establishes a new standard for assessing MLLMs’ logical reasoning abilities in dynamic environments. Our work is available at https://github.com/gongyifan-hash/COVER-Benchmark.