Motion-Grounded Video Reasoning: Understanding and Perceiving Motion at Pixel Level

Andong Deng, Tongjia Chen, Shoubin Yu, Taojiannan Yang, Lincoln Spencer, Yapeng Tian, Ajmal Saeed Mian, Mohit Bansal, Chen Chen; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 8625-8636

In this paper, we introduce Motion-Grounded Video Reasoning, a new motionunderstanding task that requires generating visual answers (video segmentationmasks) according to the input question, and hence needs implicit spatiotemporalreasoning and grounding. This task extends existing spatiotemporal groundingwork focusing on explicit action/motion grounding, to a more general format byenabling implicit reasoning via questions. To facilitate the development of the newtask, we collect a large-scale dataset called GROUNDMORE, which comprises1,715 video clips, 249K object masks that are deliberately designed with 4 questiontypes (Causal, Sequential, Counterfactual, and Descriptive) for benchmarkingdeep and comprehensive motion reasoning abilities. GROUNDMORE uniquelyrequires models to generate visual answers, providing a more concrete and visuallyinterpretable response than plain texts. It evaluates models on both spatiotemporalgrounding and reasoning, fostering to address complex challenges in motion-relatedvideo reasoning, temporal perception, and pixel-level understanding. Furthermore,we introduce a novel baseline model named Motion-Grounded Video ReasoningAssistant (MORA). MORA incorporates the multimodal reasoning ability from theMultimodal LLM, the pixel-level perception capability from the grounding model(SAM), and the temporal perception ability from a lightweight localization head.MORA achieves respectable performance on GROUNDMORE outperforming thebest existing visual grounding baseline model by an average of 21.5% relatively.We hope this novel and challenging task will pave the way for future advancementsin robust and general motion understanding via video reasoning segmentation.