MVVBench: Benchmarking 4D Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2609.30952 · cs.CV, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-25 · Read on arXiv

cs.CV, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-25

Updated: 2026-09-25

Comments: NeurIPS 2026, 23 pages, 8 figures

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

The gist: Multi-view video understanding requires integrating spatial and temporal evidence across multiple, often non-overlapping camera streams: tracking entities as they transition between viewpoints,

Terminology

Abstract

Multi-view video understanding requires integrating spatial and temporal evidence across multiple, often non-overlapping camera streams: tracking entities as they transition between viewpoints, aligning events across time, and reasoning about latent 4D continuity rather than any single visible frame. We introduce MVVBench, a benchmark for multi-view video reasoning built from real world multi camera datasets. Questions are curated to be monocular-ambiguous along both the view and the temporal axis: each question is unanswerable from any single view in the designated input set, and the majority are further unanswerable from any single moment. Each question becomes uniquely solvable only by jointly reasoning across views and across time. MVVBench spans diverse dynamic scenes and probes six capabilities: implicit/explicit attribute identification, implicit/explicit relative distance, relative camera pose, and compositional counting, with human-authored QA and rigorous verification. Beyond benchmarking, we provide an extensive analysis of when and why current vision language models succeed or fail, characterizing errors due to temporal mis-localization, cross-view identity breaks, and brittle multi-hop reasoning. We then study inference-time elicitation strategies that unlock latent multi-view competence---task-specific chain-of-thought scaffolds and structured cross-view evidence aggregation---yielding substantial gains without retraining. Finally, we present preliminary evidence that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards can elicit some latent multi-view competence in the base model, pointing to training-time approaches as a promising direction for future work. Together, MVVBench offers a rigorous evaluation of 4D multi-view reasoning and a foundation for future progress toward reliable embodied perception.

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