TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos?

Yuanxin Liu, Shicheng Li, Yi Liu, Yuxiang Wang, Shuhuai Ren, Lei Li, Sishuo Chen, Xu Sun, Lu Hou


Abstract
Recently, there is a surge in interest surrounding video large language models (Video LLMs). However, existing benchmarks fail to provide a comprehensive feedback on the temporal perception ability of Video LLMs. On the one hand, most of them are unable to distinguish between different temporal aspects (e.g., speed, direction) and thus cannot reflect the nuanced performance on these specific aspects. On the other hand, they are limited in the diversity of task formats (e.g., only multi-choice QA), which hinders the understanding of how temporal perception performance may vary across different types of tasks. Motivated by these two problems, we propose the TempCompass benchmark, which introduces a diversity of temporal aspects and task formats. To collect high-quality test data, we devise two novel strategies: (1) In video collection, we construct conflicting videos that share the same static content but differ in a specific temporal aspect, which prevents Video LLMs from leveraging single-frame bias or language priors. (2) To collect the task instructions, we propose a paradigm where humans first annotate meta-information for a video and then an LLM generates the instruction. We also design an LLM-based approach to automatically and accurately evaluate the responses from Video LLMs. Based on TempCompass, we comprehensively evaluate 9 state-of-the-art (SOTA) Video LLMs and 3 Image LLMs, and reveal the discerning fact that these models exhibit notably poor temporal perception ability.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.517
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8731–8772
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.517
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuanxin Liu, Shicheng Li, Yi Liu, Yuxiang Wang, Shuhuai Ren, Lei Li, Sishuo Chen, Xu Sun, and Lu Hou. 2024. TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 8731–8772, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos? (Liu et al., Findings 2024)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.findings-acl.517.pdf