multimodalPublished: June 23, 2026

EG-VQA: Benchmarking Verifiable Video Question Answering with Grounded Temporal Evidence

By Linpeng Huang, Weixing Chen, Zexin Chen, Yang Liu, Liang Lin

Research TL;DR

"Introduces a VideoQA benchmark requiring answers grounded in temporal evidence, and a model trained with explicit evidence supervision, revealing that scaling alone is insufficient for robust video understanding."

Abstract

Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have yielded promising performance on video question answering (VideoQA). Nevertheless, existing benchmarks are predominantly evaluated through answer correctness, while the grounding of predictions in relevant video evidence remains largely unexamined. This disconnect between answer generation and evidence understanding motivates the construction of the Evidence-Grounded Video Question Answering Benchmark (EG-VQA), an open-ended evaluation protocol in which each QA pair is explicitly annotated with supporting temporal evidence, thereby requiring joint reasoning and precise evidence localization. EG-VQA is comprised of 2,067 videos and 11,838 QA pairs with fine-grained evidence annotations. To evaluate predicted evidence, Evidence-Grounded F1 (EG-F1) is introduced as a unified metric in which temporal alignment and semantic consistency against ground-truth evidence are jointly measured. Experimental evaluation reveals that even strong proprietary models struggle to accurately ground their predictions, exposing a fundamental discrepancy between answer correctness and faithful evidence localization. To bridge this gap, EG-Reasoner, an evidence-grounded reasoning model trained with explicit supervision, is proposed. State-of-the-art performance is achieved among open-source models, with results competitive against proprietary systems, particularly pronounced gains are observed on reasoning-intensive tasks such as counterfactual questions. These findings demonstrate that scaling alone is insufficient for robust video understanding and that structured evidence supervision is essential for the development of more reliable and interpretable VideoQA systems.

Interactive SEO Tool

Embedding Vector Similarity Visualizer

Embeddings represent text in high-dimensional vector spaces. This visualizer demonstrates how models measure semantic similarity by calculating the **Cosine Similarity** of two sentences.

Cosine Similarity:0.4020
Vocabulary Size14 unique terms
Shared Terms3 terms
Intersecting Vocabulary
thebrownover
Vector Projection PlaneXYθ = 66°Vector AVector Bθ = 90° is orthogonal (0% match) · θ = 0° is parallel (100% match)

Mathematical Formulation

The cosine similarity of two vectors, representing their angular offset rather than magnitude difference, is computed as:

\[\text{Cosine Similarity} = \cos(\theta) = \frac{\mathbf{A} \cdot \mathbf{B}}{\|\mathbf{A}\| \|\mathbf{B}\|} = \frac{\sum_{i=1}^{n} A_i B_i}{\sqrt{\sum_{i=1}^{n} A_i^2} \sqrt{\sum_{i=1}^{n} B_i^2}}\]

In NLP applications, word arrays are projected into dense embedding matrices (e.g. 1536 dimensions). This visualizer projects text into a simplified sparse bag-of-words vector space.

SHARE RESEARCH: