Papers for

video analytics developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Self supervised video synthesis boosts repetitive action counting accuracy

TReViS: Temporal Repetition Structure Aware Video Synthesis for Self-supervised Repetitive Action Counting

Abstract: Fully supervised repetitive action counting (RAC) has achieved strong performance, but requires dense temporal annotations that are costly and difficult to scale. We propose TReViS, a self-supervised video synthesis framework that enables training RAC models without any repetition labels. TReViS estimates the underlying temporal repetition structure of an unlabeled video via a Temporal Self-Similarity Matrix, infers its cycle statistics, and synthesizes new training sequences that preserve realistic repetition patterns while introducing controlled temporal variability. These synthesized videos are paired with pseudo-labels and used to train existing RAC architectures from scratch. Across multiple datasets and backbones, TReViS consistently outperforms prior self-supervised methods and achieves performance competitive with several supervised baselines, while remaining fully label-free, demonstrating the effectiveness of structure-aware video synthesis for label-free RAC. The source code is available at https://github.com/yfqi/TReViS.

Mon 21 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Counting repeated actions in videos usually needs lots of time-consuming labels. The authors propose TReViS, a method that learns from unlabeled videos by finding patterns of repetitions and creating new training videos with similar cycles. This lets existing counting models train without labeled examples. Their approach performs better than other label-free methods and nearly matches models trained with labels.
Open 2609.24367v1

Video models match human accuracy but use different thinking methods

Human-Level Accuracy, Non-Human Strategies: Revealing Model-Human Divergence in Video Physical Reasoning

Abstract: Video foundation models now reach human-level accuracy on physical-reasoning benchmarks, yet such tasks require predicting unobserved physical outcomes. Do these models perform human-like forward simulation, or do they exploit statistical regularities in visible scenes? Accuracy alone cannot distinguish these strategies. We introduce a distributional evaluation framework that treats model seeds and human raters as populations, enabling comparison of consensus, uncertainty, and strategy. On the Physion benchmark, we evaluate three ViT-L architectures (V-JEPA2, VideoMAEv2, DINOv2). V-JEPA2 narrows the accuracy gap to ~1 percentage point (73.2% vs. 74.2%), yet model-human disagreement reaches 26.4%, far exceeding human-human disagreement (4.8%), with substantially lower agreement (kappa ~ 0.48 vs. 0.91). The divergence follows forward-simulation demands: models outperform humans on geometric reasoning (linking, +11.8 pp) but underperform on gravitational dynamics (rolling, -11.8 pp) and causal chains (dominoes, -10.5 pp). Strategy fingerprinting confirms all three architectures share non-human strategies while none aligns with humans. Attribution analysis suggests that unobservable outcome features, rather than visible scene properties, predict this divergence, consistent with models relying more on scene-level statistical regularities than on explicit forward simulation, a systematic divergence that accuracy alone cannot reveal. Code is available at https://github.com/fanhong-li/model-human-divergence.

Sat 19 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Video AI models can now predict physical events in videos almost as accurately as humans, but they do not think like people do. The authors found that while models make predictions well on some tasks, they struggle with others that require understanding unseen physical forces, like gravity or cause-and-effect chains. These models seem to rely more on patterns in the visible scenes than on imagining what really happens next. This shows that scoring high on accuracy doesn't mean models reason like humans.
Open 2609.22788v1

Video researcher improves long video understanding without training

VideoResearcher: Self-Improving Tool Design for Long-Video Understanding

Abstract: Video agents have made substantial progress in long-video understanding. Yet effective video-agent systems require costly, time-consuming manual design and trial and error. Current self-improvement methods either refine low-impact prompts, recombine predefined micro-tools, or struggle with convergence in harness optimization. To bridge this gap, we target high-impact video-tool with VideoResearcher, a training-free multi-agent framework that autonomously designs, tests, and refines tools for video understanding, like a human researcher. VideoResearcher operates through dual Solving and Evolving loops: it analyzes tool-use trajectories to identify capability gaps, coordinates specialized agents to develop and validate executable tools, and reuses evolved tools to strengthen evidence acquisition in subsequent video reasoning. Through iterative tool refinement and validation, it progressively strengthens evidence acquisition without updating model parameters. VideoResearcher achieves state-of-the-art performance among self-improving agents and approaches the human-designed upper bound, demonstrating a training-free paradigm for long-video understanding that expands agent capabilities through autonomous tool development while reducing costly manual engineering.

Thu 17 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Understanding long videos is hard and usually requires a lot of manual work to create tools that can analyze them well. The authors created VideoResearcher, a system that works like a human researcher by automatically designing, testing, and improving video analysis tools without needing extra training. It repeatedly improves its tools by looking at what it can’t do well and fixing those gaps. This method gets close to the quality of tools designed by humans but without the usual effort and time.
Open 2609.19664v1

Model improves video object tagging detection and captioning with test time tricks

CapMap-MS-TTA: 3rd Place Solution for the MUMU Track of the 8th LSVOS Challenge at ECCV 2026

Abstract: The MUMU track of the 8th Large-scale Video Object Segmentation (LSVOS) Challenge requires a single unified multimodal model to jointly solve image tagging (Task A), open-vocabulary object detection (Task B), and English captioning (Task C) under strict resource constraints (<=0.5B parameters and <=8 GB peak GPU memory). We present CapMap-MS-TTA, a training-free submission built on Microsoft Florence-2-base (~231M parameters), combining caption keyword mapping with multi-scale flip test-time augmentation. Task C uses the native <DETAILED_CAPTION> pathway with length/token sanitization. Task A maps the same detailed caption into the official quality/scene/event vocabularies via an expanded keyword lexicon with whole-word matching and a lightweight expand-hints stage. Task B runs Florence-2 open detection (<OD>) with multi-scale and horizontal-flip test-time augmentation (TTA), followed by label-aware non-maximum suppression (NMS). Without fine-tuning, the system improves our reproduced Florence-2 baseline from 15.16 to a best public score of 16.4815, and ranks 3rd on the final MUMU leaderboard.

Wed 16 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
The paper addresses the challenge of making one model do three different video analysis jobs—tagging images, spotting objects with any label, and writing English descriptions—while keeping the model small and memory-light. The authors built on an existing model called Florence-2 and added some clever steps without retraining it, such as mapping caption words to official tags and testing multiple image sizes and flips. This approach boosted the model's performance and earned them third place in a competition. Their method shows it’s possible to improve complex tasks by smart adjustments rather than heavy retraining.
Open 2609.18206v1

Audio visual model improves reasoning on long videos with evidence

Video-HolmesV2: Can MLLMs Reason with Spatio-Temporal Audio-Visual Evidence in Long Videos?

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive video understanding, yet their ability to reason over long-form narratives is often masked by visual-centric evaluations and inefficient context processing. Existing benchmarks over-rely on visual heuristics while marginalizing auditory cues, effectively reducing models to "silent observers" that bypass genuine cross-modal reasoning. Moreover, standard dense sampling creates an evidence-context trade-off: increasing frames to capture evidence inevitably leads to attention distraction and token explosion. To bridge these gaps, we present Video-HolmesV2, a novel benchmark designed for Deep Audio-Visual Coupling. Unlike previous works, it enforces an Evidence-Based Evaluation, requiring models to justify answers with precise spatio-temporal audio-visual evidence, thereby reducing confounding effects of guessing and hallucinated evidence. To support this, we introduce: (1) a Multi-Model Cross-Verification pipeline to ensure task rigor; (2) a Spatio-temporal Evidence-Aware Metric for fine-grained calibration. Furthermore, we propose an Audio-Text Guided Token Compression framework. By fusing task intent with auditory anchors, our method distills high-value reasoning cues to mitigate long-context noise. In our evaluation, even strong proprietary models achieve below 60% accuracy, while our approach outperforms comparable open-source omni-models.

Tue 15 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Understanding stories in long videos is hard because models get overwhelmed by lots of images and often ignore sound. The authors made a new test called Video-HolmesV2 that checks if models can use both sight and sound to answer questions and explain their answers with exact proof. They also developed a way to reduce confusing information by focusing on important parts of the video and audio. Even top models have trouble passing this test, but the new method the authors introduce works better than similar open models.
Open 2609.17248v1

Streaming video models struggle to respond at right moments

ProactiveBench: Can Streaming Video Models Really Interact Like Humans?

Abstract: Streaming video understanding requires models to process continuous multimodal input while maintaining temporal context. Existing evaluations are predominantly reactive: they query a model at a selected timestamp and therefore do not assess when it should respond. Proactive interaction instead requires monitoring a standing request, responding within an appropriate interval after the target event, and otherwise remaining silent. We introduce ProactiveBench, which evaluates models at one-second stream intervals without an explicit response cue. Its six subtasks vary trigger ambiguity and timing tolerance. Event Sensitivity geometrically combines response and silence rates on the same recording; four window-based subtasks distinguish early, in-window, and missed responses; and Duplicate Counting penalizes omissions and repetitions. Premature responses outnumber missed responses for four of the six evaluated systems, revealing a substantial gap in the temporal decision-making required for human-like interaction.

Fri 11 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Understanding what's happening in continuous video streams is hard for computers, especially when they need to decide when to respond like humans do. The authors created ProactiveBench, a way to test if video models can recognize events and respond promptly without being told exactly when to reply. They found many models respond too early rather than missing events, showing these systems still have trouble timing their answers properly. This means current models are not yet good at interacting naturally in real-time scenarios.
Open 2609.12658v1

Improving subtle human action recognition with hierarchical soft fusion

SoftRerank: Hierarchical Soft Fusion with Candidate-Label Reranking for Long-Tailed Micro-Action Recognition

Abstract: Micro-actions are subtle, low-intensity non-verbal behaviors that provide cues to fine-grained human states, including emotions and intentions. Recognizing them remains difficult because they are brief, contain weak visual changes, and often exhibit similar motion patterns across categories. This paper addresses these challenges with a fine-grained micro-action recognition method that combines full fine-tuning of InternVideo2.5, hierarchical soft fusion, and a lightweight candidate-label reranker. For the long-tailed label distribution in MA-52, we use class-balanced sampling and inverse-frequency reweighting to reduce the effect of frequent classes during training. We fine-tune InternVideo2.5 end to end and attach coarse and group-conditional fine-grained classification heads to the shared video representation, improving the consistency between coarse and fine predictions. For ambiguous samples, the candidate-label reranker uses hard samples and video-label matching to focus on easily confused fine-grained actions. Experiments validate the proposed method, which achieves a 79.99% F1-mean on MA-52 and ranks first in the 3rd Micro-Action Analysis Grand Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2026.

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMultimedia
The gist
Recognizing tiny and brief human actions like subtle gestures or facial expressions is tough because they look very similar and change very little. The authors improve this by fully training a video model and adding new ways to better distinguish similar actions, especially when some actions happen much less often than others. They also use a special method to recheck difficult cases and choose the best label. Their approach performs well on a challenging dataset of micro-actions and won a competition.
Open 2609.08221v1

Boundary voting network improves action segmentation in videos

Boundary Voting Network for Ambiguity-Aware Timestamp-Supervised Action Segmentation

Abstract: Timestamp-supervised action segmentation aims to segment and classify actions in untrimmed videos with a random frame annotated per action. Precisely localizing action boundaries from timestamp annotations is crucial for this setting, as it enables generating framewise pseudo-labels and applying the well-explored fully-supervised training. However, prevailing methods struggle with intrinsic uncertainty in boundary localization due to less discriminative features in action-transiting regions. This imprecise boundary estimation significantly reduces the stability and reliability of the generated pseudo-labels in ambiguous action-transiting regions, consequently resulting in performance deterioration of the trained segmentation models. In our paper, we introduce the boundary voting network that mitigates feature ambiguity by hierarchically propagating video-level global prior knowledge into local action-transiting regions. By generating key action representations as votes throughout the video and targeting action-transiting regions, all votes collaboratively contribute to action-transiting feature enhancement and boundary localization refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast datasets.

Tue 8 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Videos often show activities that need to be divided into clear steps, but marking exactly where one step ends and another begins is tricky when only a few frames are labeled. The authors designed a method called boundary voting network to better locate these boundaries by using clues from the whole video, helping the computer guess more accurately. This new approach helps the model learn from uncertain regions and improves how well actions are segmented. They tested it on several video datasets and found it works better than previous methods.
Open 2609.08167v1

Large synthetic dataset improves fine-grained video anomaly understanding

AnomalyCraft-700K: Component-Level Controllable and Verifiable Synthetic Anomalies for Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding

Abstract: Progress in video anomaly understanding (VAU) has long been limited by inherent deficiencies of real-world anomaly videos, which are hard to collect and offer little control over their content. Synthetic anomaly approaches partially alleviate data scarcity, yet their generation remains largely controlled at the category or prompt level. They also lack component-level verification of video-text consistency and provide insufficient hard normal samples near the normal-anomaly boundary. To address this, we present AnomalyCraft-700K, a component-controllable synthetic anomaly dataset for fine-grained VAU, containing over 40K videos and over 700K task-level textual annotations. From fine-grained semantic components and a progressive three-stage pipeline, we craft anomaly events that are richly detailed, semantically controlled, and temporally structured, and additionally construct per-category hard normal samples to prompt the model to discriminate based on anomaly semantics rather than surface visual cues. Moreover, using the components as verification units, AnomalyCraft-700K further performs component-wise correction of video-text discrepancies introduced during generation, providing reliable annotations with verified cross-modal alignment for six tasks that progress from anomaly detection, through anomaly retrieval and captioning, to fine-grained anomaly reasoning. Evaluations of widely used methods under both traditional and MLLM-based protocols demonstrate that AnomalyCraft-700K serves as an effective source of supervision, from anomaly detection to fine-grained anomaly understanding.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Video anomaly detection is hard because real unusual events are rare and difficult to collect with good details. The authors created a huge synthetic video dataset called AnomalyCraft-700K, with detailed, controllable anomalies and precise text descriptions that match video components. This dataset helps train models to better recognize subtle anomalies and understand them in fine detail. They also included tricky normal examples that look similar to anomalies to make the detection smarter.
Open 2609.06978v1