MUSEG: Reinforcing Video Temporal Understanding via Timestamp-Aware Multi-Segment Grounding

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20715v1
• Date: Tue, 27 May 2025 04:50:07 GMT
• Title: MUSEG: Reinforcing Video Temporal Understanding via Timestamp-Aware Multi-Segment Grounding
• Authors: Fuwen Luo, Shengfeng Lou, Chi Chen, Ziyue Wang, Chenliang Li, Weizhou Shen, Jiyue Guo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Yang Liu,
• Abstract summary: Video temporal understanding is crucial for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to reason over events in videos.<n>We propose MUSEG, a novel RL-based method that enhances temporal understanding by introducing timestamp-aware multi-segment grounding.<n>To facilitate effective learning, we design a customized RL training recipe with phased rewards that progressively guides the model toward temporally grounded reasoning.
• Score: 55.32878803528196
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Video temporal understanding is crucial for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to reason over events in videos. Despite recent advances in general video understanding, current MLLMs still struggle with fine-grained temporal reasoning. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been explored to address this issue recently, existing RL approaches remain limited in effectiveness. In this work, we propose MUSEG, a novel RL-based method that enhances temporal understanding by introducing timestamp-aware multi-segment grounding. MUSEG enables MLLMs to align queries with multiple relevant video segments, promoting more comprehensive temporal reasoning. To facilitate effective learning, we design a customized RL training recipe with phased rewards that progressively guides the model toward temporally grounded reasoning. Extensive experiments on temporal grounding and time-sensitive video QA tasks demonstrate that MUSEG significantly outperforms existing methods and generalizes well across diverse temporal understanding scenarios. View our project at https://github.com/THUNLP-MT/MUSEG.

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