Papers for

video editing software 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.

Edited endpoints improve video transition quality with fewer artifacts

Edited Endpoints as Partial Goals for Image-to-Video Generation

Abstract: Edited endpoint images make the target of an image-to-video transition explicit and can improve transition completion, but also preserve context in the source image's layout. Full-frame endpoint conditioning turns this preserved context into requirements on the video's final state, potentially inducing temporal artifacts. We measure discontinuity with Hard-Cut (HC), late background reversal with Background Motion Reversal (BMR), and motion suppression with Dynamic Degree (DD). These artifacts appear across five video models spanning training-free and learned endpoint conditioning, in model-specific forms. We study Partial, a selective conditioning scheme that constrains only an edit-relevant region estimated from image-editor attention and leaves the remaining terminal content to the video model. Across three backbones on TC-Bench-I2V, Partial reduces temporal artifacts relative to full-frame conditioning, with no significant difference in Transition Completion Ratio (TCR); on Wan2.2-Turbo, uniformly weakening conditioning does not reproduce these reductions. A donor-context intervention keeps full-frame conditioning and replaces only the context outside the edit-relevant region with the final frame of a Partial video. It lowers HC and BMR on HunyuanVideo-1.5 and lowers BMR while restoring DD on Wan2.2-Turbo, with no significant difference in TCR, so constraint extent alone does not account for these artifacts. Together, these findings suggest that edited endpoints should serve as partial future goals, although edit relevance does not guarantee future validity. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/wannagetacat/Edited-Endpoints-I2V.

Thu 29 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating videos that smoothly transition from one image to another can be tricky because sometimes the video shows glitches or unnatural movements. The paper finds that focusing only on the parts of the image that actually change, instead of the entire image, helps reduce these glitches. The authors tested this idea on several video models and showed it keeps the video smooth without affecting how well the transition finishes. This approach treats the edited image as a partial goal, leading to better video quality.
Open → 2610.39179v1

MatAnyone-E speeds up high-resolution video matting by focusing memory use

MatAnyone-E: Sparse Memory Propagation for Efficient High-Resolution Video Matting

Abstract: High-resolution video matting requires preserving fine details, such as hair strands and soft transparency, while maintaining consistency across frames. Memory-based methods achieve strong matting quality by matching current-frame features with information stored from earlier frames, but this process becomes increasingly costly as resolution grows. We present MatAnyone-E, an efficient extension of MatAnyone 2 that focuses computation where it is most needed. Our approach first performs low-resolution propagation to identify uncertain regions that require closer inspection and the memory candidates most relevant to them. It then performs high-resolution matching only for these regions using the selected memory, while reusing low-resolution matching results elsewhere. This strategy reduces both the number of locations requiring detailed matching and the amount of memory searched, while preserving the information needed to produce a complete matte. We further reduce the cost of generating high-resolution mattes with a lightweight decoder designed around measured runtime bottlenecks and trained to reproduce the original decoder's representations. Experiments show that MatAnyone-E maintains matting quality comparable to MatAnyone 2 while achieving an estimated 7.4x inference speedup and reducing peak GPU memory usage to 7.6% of the usage of MatAnyone 2 at 4K. With compilation-enabled inference on a single NVIDIA H200 GPU, it reaches 73.07 FPS at 1080p and 28.62 FPS at 4K.

Mon 26 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
High-resolution video matting tries to separate people or objects from backgrounds while keeping tiny details like hair sharp and smooth over time. The authors improved an existing method by first working on low-resolution versions to find tricky areas that need more attention. Then, only those areas get the full high-resolution treatment, saving a lot of time and memory without losing quality. Their method can run much faster and use less GPU power, even for very detailed 4K videos.
Open → 2610.35724v1

Fine-grained credit assignment helps in complex video editing tasks

When Fine-Grained Credit Assignment Helps and Hurts: Multimodal Agentic Reinforcement Learning through Video Editing

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise for training multimodal agents to reason and use tools. However, it remains unclear when fine-grained credit assignment improves learning and when it fails to improve task performance. Video editing provides a useful testbed for this question, combining multimodal perception, long-horizon planning, and tool use with delayed outcome feedback. We construct four movie-trailer editing task types---Content Selection, Narrative Sequencing, Rough Cut, and Fine Cut---that reflect real-world editing workflows and span different levels of task complexity and interaction horizon. Decaying process rewards provides the largest benefit on Fine Cut, with a 45.4% relative gain over outcome-only GRPO on tasks averaging more than 60 turns under outcome-only GRPO. On the three shorter-horizon task types averaging 30--40 turns under the same baseline, outcome-only GRPO remains competitive, with decaying process rewards yielding at most a 10.4% relative gain. Process rewards from an LLM judge initially improve tool use and encourage visual inspection. As training progresses, however, GRPO+PRM with a fixed process-reward weight increasingly exhibits excessive reasoning and redundant tool calls: process rewards continue to rise while task completion rates and outcome scores decline. Decaying the process-reward weight to zero mitigates this reward-hacking behavior while preserving the early gains. Despite dense token-level supervision, on-policy self-distillation (OPSD) yields little improvement or substantial degradation and is highly sensitive to the choice of privileged information. Our analysis reveals differences in teacher--student disagreement and gradient magnitudes, and suggests possible dilution of informative signals over long trajectories.

Mon 26 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Fine-grained credit assignment in reinforcement learning means giving detailed feedback during learning, instead of only judging success at the end. The authors explored when this detailed feedback improves training for AI systems that edit videos, a task involving many steps and different kinds of reasoning. They found it helps a lot on very complex editing tasks with long sequences of actions but less so on simpler tasks. However, if the detailed feedback is not gradually reduced, it can lead the AI to overthink or repeat unnecessary steps. Another technique meant to improve learning, on-policy self-distillation, showed little benefit and was sensitive to extra information used.
Open → 2610.35497v1

Audio visual method detects edits in long videos with sparse changes

AV-FABLE: Audio-Visual Manipulation Forensics in Long-Form Videos

Abstract: Localized AI manipulations in long-form videos often affect brief events within otherwise authentic content, making video-level classification insufficient for forensic analysis. Existing audio-visual deepfake benchmarks largely focus on short talking-head clips, while long-form temporal forensics remains predominantly visual. We introduce AV-FABLE, a dual-timeline benchmark for sparse manipulations in open-scene long-form audio-visual videos. AV-FABLE contains 16,650 pristine--manipulated twin pairs (998 hours) created with 27 editing configurations, with separate audio and visual timelines that enable modality-specific temporal localization and expose errors hidden by joint-timeline evaluation. On AV-FABLE, zero-shot prompting of audio-visual large language models (AV-LLMs) yields near-chance detection and poor temporal localization. In contrast, supervised readouts of their frozen perception features recover strong forensic signals, suggesting manipulation evidence is encoded in these representations but not effectively exposed through language outputs. Motivated by this observation, we propose NFSR(Native Forensics via Separated Readouts), which reads frozen AV-LLM features with separate audio and visual temporal decoders. NFSR achieves the best audio-visual localization performance in-domain and across all three out-of-distribution settings, including transfer to held-out videos from an external long-video forensic benchmark. AV-FABLE, code, and model weights will be publicly released.

Sat 24 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMultimedia
The gist
It can be hard to find small edited parts in long videos that mostly look real. The authors created a big test set called AV-FABLE with many long videos that have small audio or visual edits, to help find these tricky changes. They tried using big audio-visual language models to spot edits but got almost random results. However, when they used parts of these models in a new way that looks separately at audio and video, they could find the edited parts much better. Their approach works well even on new videos not seen before.
Open → 2610.33413v1

Multimodal AI models evaluated for automated video ad clipping

AdShot: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Video Advertisement Clipping

Abstract: Advertisers routinely create multiple duration variants of ads to meet marketing budgets and viewer preferences, a labor-intensive and costly process. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at general video understanding, their ability to perform specialized editorial tasks remains unexplored. We introduce AdShot, a benchmark for evaluating MLLMs on shot selection for ad clipping. It contains 823 professionally edited ad pairs (30-sec sources and 15-sec edits) across 194 brands and 17 industries, annotated with shot-level boundaries and content features (action, emotion, information, imagery). We evaluate 13 state-of-the-art video-only MLLMs and 2 audio-visual MLLMs (7B-72B parameters) on shot selection accuracy (Precision, Recall, F1), duration constraints (15s), and content preservation, including an audio ablation. We find: (1) model architecture matters more than scale, with smaller models often matching or exceeding larger ones; performance is strongest for target ads with 6-10 shots; (2) models exhibit a mean absolute duration error of 5.39s, with most tending to overshoot the 15s target, though they can still substantially reduce human editing effort; (3) all models exhibit systematic content biases, favoring information-rich and emotion-focused shots while under-selecting action and imagery. We publicly release our benchmark to facilitate research at the intersection of multimodal AI and computational advertising.

Sat 24 OctMultimediaComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating shorter versions of video ads is often slow and expensive for advertisers. The authors introduce AdShot, a test set to see how well advanced AI models can pick the right video shots to make these shorter ads. They tested many models and found smaller ones sometimes do as well as bigger ones, that models tend to make ads a bit too long, and that they prefer certain types of content over others. This helps us understand how well AI can assist in editing ads automatically.
Open → 2610.33377v1

Frozen foundation models improve dense optical flow estimation accuracy

Foundation Model Driven Optical Flow

Abstract: We investigate how frozen pretrained visual and depth representations support dense optical flow when coupled with a supervised matching network. Building on TTSFlow, this paper studies Dense Prediction Transformer (DPT) feature decoding and one coarse-to-fine refinement stage. Our method fuses features from frozen DINOv2 and Depth Anything V2 models and estimates optical flow through a trainable transformer-based matching pipeline. After optical-flow training on FlyingChairs and FlyingThings3D, it achieves 2.37 endpoint error (EPE) on the Sintel training split, Final pass, compared with 2.52 for the FlowSeek (T) configuration reported here. Our RoCo-Spring 2026 entry, RoCo-29.VSAI, obtains a robustness-balanced score of 1.1038, Spring EPE of 1.411, and RobustSpring proxy EPE of 4.739, with a lower balanced score than seven of the twelve listed reference baselines. These results characterize the complete pipeline, which reuses frozen foundation backbones and performs one refinement stage. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/Visual-and-Spatial-AI-Lab/FFlow}

Mon 19 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionRobotics
The gist
Optical flow helps track how things move between video frames, which is useful in many technologies like self-driving cars and video editing. This paper shows a way to improve optical flow by using features from existing, powerful image and depth models without changing their inner workings. The authors combined these reused features with a new matching system and trained it to predict motion accurately. Their approach performs well compared to earlier methods, demonstrating that frozen foundation models can effectively support motion estimation with limited extra training.
Open → 2610.26690v1

CRISP enhances low-light videos using progressive training and semantics

CRISP: Progressive Illumination Curriculum for Recurrent Low-Light Video Enhancement with Semantic Priors

Abstract: Low-light video enhancement requires the recovery of brightness, color, and fine spatial structures while preserving temporal coherence in the presence of noise and motion. Existing methods often struggle to balance these objectives, particularly in severely degraded regions. This paper presents CRISP, a recurrent framework trained using a progressive illumination curriculum. Its two-frame recurrent architecture propagates information across successive frames to exploit temporal context beyond the immediate input pair. During training, supervision progressively transitions from intermediate targets interpolated between the low-light input and the reference to the full reference, gradually increasing the required brightness and color correction. This curriculum stabilizes recurrent training without introducing additional inference cost and yields the largest performance improvement among the components evaluated in the ablation study. To further support structural reconstruction, the framework optionally incorporates frozen DINOv3 semantic features through adaptive layer normalization (AdaLN)-style modulation, without fine-tuning the foundation model. Experiments on DID and BVI-RLV demonstrate that CRISP achieves the highest PSNR on DID and the highest SSIM on BVI-RLV among the evaluated methods, while maintaining computational efficiency.

Fri 16 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Taking videos in dark places can make them look blurry, noisy, or unclear. The authors introduce a new method called CRISP that improves these dark videos by gradually teaching a computer to brighten and fix colors over time, while also using information about what's in the scene to make details clearer. This approach helps keep video frames looking smooth and connected, even when there's movement or noise. Tests show this method produces clearer and more natural-looking videos compared to others.
Open → 2610.24299v1

Event driven refresh improves video object tracking accuracy and efficiency

Event-Driven Refresh and Recurrence Memory to Reduce Stale Grounding in Referring Video Object Segmentation

Abstract: Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to produce a pixel-accurate mask sequence for an object specified by natural language. Sa2VA combines a multimodal large language model with SAM2 for grounded segmentation; however, its inference typically grounds the query from a small fixed set of initial keyframes and then relies on propagation. In long or dynamic videos, this can cause stale grounding and persistent false positives when the object composition changes (e.g., distractors enter or the target disappears/re-appears). We propose Event-Driven Refresh + Recurrence Memory (EDRRM), an enhancement that selectively re-invokes Sa2VA only at stable change points. EDRRM triggers refresh boundaries using an EMA-smoothed event score computed from tracking-derived cues (births/deaths and coarse composition/layout changes) with temporal constraints. A recurrence memory further retrieves anchor frames via CLIP similarity to re-condition the model on re-appearance events. Experiments on Ref-DAVIS17, MeViS, and ReVOS show that EDRRM achieves a competitive accuracy-efficiency trade-off relative to fixed-window and FrameDiff-SSIM baselines, maintaining comparable or superior J&F scores at substantially lower average refresh-call budgets and reducing false-positive failures. End-to-end runtime analysis further confirms that the overhead introduced by tracking, CLIP-based recurrence matching, and the identifiability gate remains modest relative to the dominant Sa2VA inference cost, thereby validating the efficiency of the proposed pipeline.

Wed 30 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Tracking objects in video using natural language can get confused if objects disappear or change a lot over time. The authors improved an existing video object tracking system by adding a way to refresh its focus only when important changes happen in the video. This makes the system more accurate and reduces errors while using less computing power. Their tests show it works better than methods that refresh too often or too little, especially in longer or more complex videos.
Open → 2609.38758v1

Adaptive reward routing improves joint audio video generation quality

Adaptive Reward Routing: Dynamic Multi-Reward Optimization for Joint Audio-Video Diffusion via Forward-Process RL

Abstract: Multi-reward guided reinforcement learning (i.e., RL) offers a promising way to improve joint audio-video diffusion models along several complementary objectives, including modality-specific quality, cross-modal semantic alignment, and temporal synchronization. Its effectiveness, however, depends on two quantities that change during training: where reward-driven updates should act, and how competing rewards should be combined. Existing methods tend to rely on fixed routing and reward weights, failing to track evolving model functions. To address these limitations, we propose Adaptive Reward Routing to jointly adapt update locations and reward coordination during forward-process RL (i.e., DiffusionNFT) of joint audio-video diffusion models. Our method consists of two components. (i) Cross-Modal Influence-Guided Routing (Localizing Updates): We use bidirectional cross-attention responses as an efficient proxy for evolving cross-modal influence, dynamically reweighting token-aware losses and scaling gradients across cross-modal layers without additional model interventions. (ii) Preference-Preserving Modality-Aware Reweighting (Coordinating Rewards): We preserve predefined weights as preference priors and use branch-specific reward-gradient interactions as residual corrections after warm-up. This resolves evolving conflicts without letting dominant rewards suppress weak but essential objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in modality quality, semantic consistency, and audio-video synchronization over strong RL baselines. Ablations and mechanism analyses further validate the complementary benefits of adaptive update routing and reward coordination.

Tue 29 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Generating audio and video together to match well and stay in sync is hard. The paper's authors tackle this by letting a kind of learning system adjust where and how it pays attention to different goals during training. They use clues from how the audio and video parts influence each other to better guide updates. This helps the system improve the clarity, matching, and timing of the sounds and images it creates.
Open → 2609.37200v1

Fastvr restores hd video quality quickly using efficient diffusion models

FastVR: Efficient Streaming Video Restoration with One-Step Diffusion

Abstract: Diffusion-based video restoration recovers realistic details, but its practical deployment is limited by two efficiency bottlenecks: costly VAE encoding and decoding, and the quadratic cost of full self-attention in diffusion transformers (DiTs). This paper presents FastVR, a streaming video restoration framework built on a one-step diffusion model, which delivers strong restoration quality and temporal consistency while processing 1080p video at 11 FPS on a single H20 GPU. To improve inference efficiency, FastVR combines a lightweight VAE with chunk-wise causal attention, which substantially reduces the computational cost. During training, it further adopts velocity consistency regularization and continuous trajectory learning, which improve restoration quality. Extensive experiments show that FastVR is more efficient than the evaluated diffusion baselines while achieving state-of-the-art performance on synthetic and real-world benchmarks. We hope that this work supports further progress in the community.

Tue 29 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
High-quality video restoration often takes a lot of computing power, making it hard to use in real-time settings. The authors created FastVR, a system that speeds up this process by simplifying parts of the video enhancement method and smartly focusing on chunks of video frames. This makes it possible to restore full HD videos smoothly and quickly while keeping details and continuity between frames. FastVR was tested on different video types and works better and faster than similar methods.
Open → 2609.36757v1

Model learns to add and remove sounds in video scenes

AVIO: Learning to Add and Remove Sounding Objects in Audiovisual Scenes

Abstract: Adding or removing a sounding object requires coordinated changes to visual content and sound while preserving the surrounding scene. Yet paired supervision for localized non-speech audiovisual editing remains limited, as visual and acoustic edits must target the same object and isolate its sound from overlapping sources. To address this gap, we introduce \textit{AVIOBench}, a dataset comprising 37.9 hours of paired audiovisual examples spanning 1{,}878 target-object names. AVIOBench links the visual presence and acoustic contribution of each target object through a shared identity and visual mask. Our automated pipeline uses visual grounding and cross-modal consistency to select target-sound removal candidates, then jointly refines the audiovisual pairs to improve perceptual quality and cross-modal consistency. Building on this dataset, we propose \textit{AVIO}, which adapts a pretrained text-to audiovisual generation model through source-conditioned feature modulation to jointly learn object addition and removal. A reference-frame curriculum gradually reduces reference conditioning during training, enabling one model to perform instruction-only editing with optional visual guidance. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate effective audiovisual object removal and addition, with optional reference guidance providing appearance and placement control for addition.

Tue 29 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Editing videos to add or remove specific sounds and objects is hard because the changes must match both the visuals and the audio perfectly. The authors created AVIOBench, a data collection linking objects with their sounds and locations, to help teach computers this skill. They then developed AVIO, a model that can learn from AVIOBench to add or remove sounding objects in audiovisual scenes using instructions and optional visual hints. This approach helps the model make coordinated changes that look and sound natural.
Open → 2609.36503v1

Video models keep object identities better under occlusion and overlaps

Learning to Reason with Persistent Object States for Video Instance Segmentation

Abstract: Video segmentation models maintain object identities by carrying instance information across frames. Under prolonged occlusion, reappearance, or interactions between similar instances, however, an unreliable update can overwrite a valid history and cause persistent identity drift. We introduce POSReasoner, a trainable, plug-and-play framework that explicitly decides when an observation should change an object's state. Each persistent state records identity, confidence, and absence history. A sparse state-observation graph supports Propose-Verify reasoning: provisional associations are revisited using object history, predicted presence, and competition among identities. The verified decisions determine whether to retain, update, reactivate, or suppress each state, while a learned gate controls the evidence written back to memory. Only verified transitions update the persistent state used in subsequent frames. POSReasoner uses standard video annotations and keeps the base model frozen, enabling integration with diverse VOS and VIS architectures. Experiments across long-term VOS and VIS benchmarks show consistent improvements over strong baselines, with the largest gains under occlusion and object reappearance.

Mon 28 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Tracking objects in videos can be tricky when they get hidden or look very similar to others. The authors introduce POSReasoner, a tool that carefully checks when to update the memory of an object's position and identity, avoiding mistakes that happen from confusing objects over time. It uses a system that proposes possible matches and then verifies them before confirming updates, helping to keep track of objects accurately even after they disappear and reappear. This approach works with different existing video segmentation models and improves their accuracy, especially in difficult cases.
Open → 2609.35539v1

Speaker temporal memory improves multi speaker speech recognition accuracy

STAM-ASR: Speaker-Temporal Anchoring with Memory for Multi-Speaker ASR

Abstract: Natural conversations make both speech recognition and speaker attribution challenging for ASR, as speakers take turns, overlap, and reappear over time. We propose STAM-ASR, Speaker-Temporal Anchoring with Memory, a lightweight framework that extends an already pretrained AudioLLM for multi-speaker ASR. Without relying on an external diarization system, STAM-ASR learns speaker activity and speaker-aware representations directly from intermediate AudioLLM features. Hence providing explicit who and when cues to modulate the AudioLLM's semantic representation without explicit speech separation. STAM-ASR further maintains fixed-size speaker and conversational memories to carry complementary context across turns. We evaluate STAM-ASR on AMI, ICSI, LibriCSS, and NOTSOFAR-1 across close-talk, far-field, overlapping, and cross-domain conditions. Our reported results shows that speaker-temporal conditioning and memory provide complementary benefits, while the gap between reference and predicted speaker activity identifies robust speaker tracking as a key remaining challenge.

Thu 24 SeptSound
The gist
Understanding who is speaking and when they talk is hard in conversations where people speak over each other and come back later. The authors created a method called STAM-ASR that helps speech recognition systems figure out speaker identity and timing without needing separate steps to separate voices. It uses memory to remember who spoke earlier and builds on existing speech AI models. Tests on multiple real-world conversation types show that remembering speaker info and timing helps, but accurately tracking speakers over time remains tough.
Open → 2609.29805v1

High fidelity diffusion model improves smooth zoom between dual cameras

ZoomDiff: A High-Fidelity Diffusion Model for Dual-Camera Smooth Zooming

Abstract: Digital zoom transitions between dual cameras often exhibit conspicuous discontinuities in geometric structure and chromatic consistency, degrading the user experience. While recent dual-camera smooth zoom (DCSZ) methods attempt to mitigate this by fine-tuning frame interpolation (FI) models on DCSZ data, they struggle with the large cross-view disparities and complex geometric transformations. Considering that the generative prior of diffusion models is suitable for addressing this problem, we explore their application to DCSZ. However, naively applying existing diffusion-based FI models still yields low-fidelity transitions due to insufficient conditional guidance, high-frequency information loss during VAE encoding, as well as inadequate temporal consistency. To address this, we propose ZoomDiff, a high-fidelity diffusion model that leverages dual-camera inputs in both latent and pixel spaces for photo-realistic transitions. Specifically, we first strengthen dual-image conditional guidance during the multi-step denoising process to improve geometric consistency. Then we inject flow-aligned multi-scale features from the VAE encoder into the VAE decoder to recover high-frequency details, where flow-guided temporal consistency supervision are introduced to produce more smooth transitions. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ZoomDiff outperforms state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively. Project page: https://jiayi-hit.github.io/ZoomDiff.github.io/.

Wed 23 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Digital zooming between two cameras often looks jumpy or unnatural because the images don’t blend well. The authors found that existing methods struggle to fix this due to big differences between camera views and complex changes in the images. They created ZoomDiff, a new AI model that carefully combines details from both cameras to make much smoother and clearer zoom transitions. Tests showed ZoomDiff makes better-looking zooms than current state-of-the-art methods.
Open → 2609.28083v1

Video quality assessment improves by focusing on key spatio temporal patches

High-Fidelity Video Quality Assessment with VQA-Specific Saliency

Abstract: No-reference video quality assessment (NR VQA) has recently seen promising progress with deep learning. However, video data is inherently large, and processing them with deep models incurs high computational cost. This challenge is particularly acute in VQA, where preserving original-resolution cues and dense temporal information is critical for accuracy. Existing efficiency-driven preprocessing strategies, such as fragmenting, reduce computation but alter the input data distribution, limiting effective reuse of pretrained video foundation models (ViFMs). To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{H}igh-\textbf{F}idelity \textbf{V}ideo \textbf{Q}uality \textbf{A}ssessment (\textbf{HFVQA}), a framework built on fixed-size spatio-temporal (ST) patches that is fully compatible with pretrained ViFMs. HFVQA samples ST patches across multiple scales, including the original resolution, with minimal temporal subsampling to preserve low-level quality cues and semantic context. To limit computation, HFVQA introduces a lightweight auxiliary network trained end-to-end with the ViFM encoder to learn \textit{VQA-specific saliency}. Distilled directly from quality supervision, this saliency captures task-specific importance patterns, reflecting that video quality perception is dominated by a small subset of spatio-temporal regions. By combining high-fidelity spatio-temporal cues with learned, task-specific saliency, HFVQA achieves SOTA performance on standard NR VQA benchmarks while processing as little as 12\% of candidate ST patches, making high-fidelity ViFM-based VQA computationally tractable.

Tue 15 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Evaluating video quality without needing a perfect reference is hard because videos have lots of data and details that matter. The authors propose a new way to analyze videos by breaking them into smaller space and time patches, focusing only on the most important parts to human perception. They teach a small helper network to learn which parts really affect how we see video quality, so the system can ignore less important patches. This method keeps important details at the original video resolution while reducing the amount of data processed, making it faster and more accurate.
Open → 2609.16946v1

Video object removal evaluation benchmark aligned with human perception

VOR-Bench: A Human Perception-Driven Benchmark for Video Object Removal

Abstract: Despite its crucial role in video object removal (VOR), existing evaluation paradigms face two critical limitations: questionable references and a misalignment between tradi- tional metrics and human preference. To address these challenges, we introduce VOR- Bench, which advances VOR evaluation through three integrated components. First, we present the VOR Dataset (VORD), the first benchmark dataset providing both paired edited videos and graffiti masks. Its unique strength lies in a diverse data spectrum, which encompasses model-generated, tool-rendered, and camera-captured data, ensuring robust assessment across real-world scenarios. Second, we develop rMPAF, a realistic Motion- capable Paired-video Acquisition Framework. By combining the strengths of image- based object removal and fine-tuned video generation models, rMPAF automatically generates realistic, motion-coherent paired videos. Finally, we propose three evaluation dimensions and introduce VOR-MDSM, the first perception-driven VLM-based scoring model specifically designed for mask-guided VOR. It bridges the gap between arithmetic metrics and human perception by covering the essential visual attributes and matching nuanced human judgment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VOR-Bench yields evaluation results that align closely with human perception, achieving a remarkable cor- relation (\r{ho} > 0.9) with subjective assessments. We will release VOR-Bench along with its documentation to ensure full reproducibility.

Tue 15 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Removing objects from videos is tricky to evaluate because existing methods often don’t match what people think looks good. The authors introduce VOR-Bench, a new way to test video object removal methods that better reflects how humans perceive quality. They created a diverse dataset including various types of videos and a system to produce realistic video pairs for testing. They also developed a new scoring model that aligns closely with human judgment on how well objects are removed. Their work helps make video editing tools that rely on removing objects more reliable and naturally evaluated.
Open → 2609.16878v1

Long video reasoning model improves question answering accuracy

Long-to-Short Video Evidence Reasoning for Grounded Question Answering

Abstract: We present LOVER, a \underline{L}ong to sh\underline{O}rt \underline{V}ideo \underline{E}vidence \underline{R}einforced model for grounded question answering (GQA). LOVER highlights three innovations over existing reinforcement-learning (RL) based video reasoning models: (1) \textbf{Long-to-short Video Evidence Curriculum Learning}, which organizes RL training according to evidence duration and progressively adapts the model from long-range grounding to short-term reasoning; (2) \textbf{GQA Rewards}, which underscore the benefit of IoP reward over IoU for evidence spotting rather than strict temporal span overlap; (3) \textbf{Adaptive Timestamp Rendering}, which adaptively renders timestamps onto video frames using background-aware position and color selection to enhance temporal observability. The three designs are model-agnostic and reciprocal. They effectively improve QA, grounding, and grounded QA performance over different backbones. Notably, LOVER built on Time-R1 achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results among open-source models on popular GQA benchmarks: NExT-GQA and ReXTime. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our three innovative components.

Mon 14 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Answering questions about videos often requires understanding what happens over different time periods. The authors introduce LOVER, a model that learns by first focusing on longer video parts and then shorter ones, improving its ability to find the right video evidence to answer questions. They also designed better ways to reward the model when it spots important video segments and made timestamps easier to see on videos. Their approach works with different underlying systems and sets new performance records on popular video question datasets.
Open → 2609.15224v1