📝 SummarXiv

Abstract

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) has made significant strides by leveraging multimodal learning to align visual and textual modalities. However, current benchmarks overwhelmingly focus on questions answerable through explicit visual content - actions, objects, and events directly observable within individual frames or short clips. In contrast, creative and cinematic videos - such as movies, TV shows, and narrative-driven content - employ storytelling techniques that deliberately omit certain depictions, requiring viewers to infer motives, relationships across discontinuous frames with disjoint visual contexts. Humans naturally excel at such implicit reasoning, seamlessly integrating information across time and context to construct coherent narratives. Yet current benchmarks fail to capture this essential dimension of human-like understanding. To bridge this gap, we present ImplicitQA, a novel benchmark specifically designed to test VideoQA models on human-like implicit reasoning. ImplicitQA comprises 1K meticulously annotated QA pairs drawn from 1K high-quality creative video clips covering 15 genres across 7 decades of content. Questions are systematically categorized into nine key reasoning dimensions: lateral and vertical spatial reasoning, depth and proximity, viewpoint and visibility, motion and trajectory, causal and motivational reasoning, social interactions, physical context, and inferred counting. These annotations are deliberately challenging, crafted by authors, validated through multiple annotators, and benchmarked against human performance to ensure high quality. Our extensive evaluations on 11 leading VideoQA models reveals consistent and significant performance degradation, underscoring their reliance on surface-level visual cues and highlighting the difficulty of implicit reasoning. https://huggingface.co/datasets/ucf-crcv/ImplicitQA.