FineBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Vision-Language Models for Fine-grained Human Activity Understanding

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19846v3
• Date: Sat, 23 May 2026 07:31:13 GMT
• Title: FineBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Vision-Language Models for Fine-grained Human Activity Understanding
• Abstract summary: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in general video understanding.<n>They often struggle with the fine-grained comprehension crucial for real-world applications.<n>We introduce FineBench, a benchmark specifically designed to assess fine-grained understanding.
• Score: 30.42523020030251
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in general video understanding, yet they often struggle with the fine-grained comprehension crucial for real-world applications requiring nuanced interpretation of human actions and interactions. While some recent human-centric benchmarks evaluate aspects of model behaviour such as fairness/ethics, emotion perception, and broader human-centric metrics, they do not combine long-form videos, very dense QA coverage, and frame-level spatial/temporal grounding at scale. To bridge this gap, we introduce FineBench, a human-centric video question answering (VQA) benchmark specifically designed to assess fine-grained understanding. FineBench comprises 199,420 multiple-choice QA pairs densely annotated across 64 long-form videos (15 minutes each), focusing on detailed person movement, person interaction, and object manipulation, including compositional actions. Our extensive evaluation reveals that while proprietary models like GPT-5 achieve respectable performance, current open-source VLMs significantly underperform, struggling particularly with spatial reasoning in multi-person scenes and distinguishing subtle differences in human movements and interactions. To address these identified weaknesses, we propose FineAgent, a modular framework that enhances VLMs by leveraging a Localizer and a Descriptor. Experiments show that FineAgent consistently improves the performance of various open VLMs on FineBench. FineBench provides a rigorous testbed for future research into fine-grained human-centric video understanding, while FineAgent offers a practical approach to enhance such reasoning in current VLMs. Project page and code at https://joslefaure.github.io/assets/html/finebench.html.

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