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TempCloze: Can Video-LLMs Identify the Missing Middle?

arxiv.org/abs/2609.01515

Updated 43 min ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294WYDYBCN8974K609HMSN8

Published
1 Sept 2026
T2 · 46 min ago
arXiv
2609.01515
T2 · 46 min ago

Abstract

Temporal reasoning benchmarks for Video-LLMs are often mediated by language, leaving room for linguistic shortcuts from option wording, answer correlations, or language priors. To reduce such shortcuts, we introduce TempCloze, a video cloze benchmark for evaluating visual temporal reasoning in Video-LLMs. Given the beginning and ending clips of a video, models must identify the true missing middle from four candidates. TempCloze contains 1,521 carefully filtered videos from seven sources, mainly long-take and egocentric videos. We construct same-source distractors along three dimensions: Semantic asks what event should happen, Alignment probes when it should occur, and Progression tests how it should unfold, while shared scenes and objects reduce appearance cues. Our evaluation of 10 proprietary and 21 open-source Video-LLMs reveals Alignment as the primary bottleneck: models often recognize plausible semantic content and local event progression but struggle with temporal alignment. We further conduct error pattern and behavioral sensitivity analyses on TempCloze-Mixed and TempCloze-Hard with four representative models to examine where errors arise and how candidate order, context direction, visible span, frame density, and test-time scaling influence model choices.

Authors 7

Wenqi Pei, Henry Hengyuan Zhao, Yilai Liu, Jiahao Meng, Han Chen, Ziyu Wang, Hongyang Du

Specification

Official page

Source:Hugging Face Hub (public pages, model cards, papers)T2observed 46 min agomedium

arXiv id
2609.01515

Source:Hugging Face Hub (public pages, model cards, papers)T2observed 46 min agomedium

Github repo
CedricPei/Temporal-Cloze

Source:Hugging Face Hub (public pages, model cards, papers)T2observed 46 min agomedium

Hf paper url
https://huggingface.co/papers/2609.01515

Source:Hugging Face Hub (public pages, model cards, papers)T2observed 46 min agomedium

Github stars
5

Source:Hugging Face Hub (public pages, model cards, papers)T2observed 43 min agomedium

Hf comments
1

Source:Hugging Face Hub (public pages, model cards, papers)T2observed 43 min agomedium

Upvotes
6

Source:Hugging Face Hub (public pages, model cards, papers)T2observed 43 min agomedium

Published
1 Sept 2026

Source:Hugging Face Hub (public pages, model cards, papers)T2observed 46 min agomedium

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Provenance

Attributed facts

11

Source tiers

T211

Freshest observation

43 min ago

Conflicts

None