English

Are Video Reasoning Models Ready to Go Outside?

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-04-15 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

In real-world deployment, vision-language models often encounter disturbances such as weather, occlusion, and camera motion. Under such conditions, their understanding and reasoning degrade substantially, revealing a gap between clean, controlled (i.e., unperturbed) evaluation settings and real-world robustness. To address this limitation, we propose ROVA, a novel training framework that improves robustness by modeling a robustness-aware consistency reward under spatio-temporal corruptions. ROVA introduces a difficulty-aware online training strategy that prioritizes informative samples based on the model's evolving capability. Specifically, it continuously re-estimates sample difficulty via self-reflective evaluation, enabling adaptive training with a robustness-aware consistency reward. We also introduce PVRBench, a new benchmark that injects real-world perturbations into embodied video datasets to assess both accuracy and reasoning quality under realistic disturbances. We evaluate ROVA and baselines on PVRBench, UrbanVideo, and VisBench, where open-source and proprietary models suffer up to 35% and 28% drops in accuracy and reasoning under realistic perturbations. ROVA effectively mitigates performance degradation, boosting relative accuracy by at least 24% and reasoning by over 9% compared with baseline models (QWen2.5/3-VL, InternVL2.5, Embodied-R). These gains transfer to clean standard benchmarks, yielding consistent improvements.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.10652,
  title  = {Are Video Reasoning Models Ready to Go Outside?},
  author = {Yangfan He and Changgyu Boo and Jaehong Yoon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.10652},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Project Page: https://robust-video-reason.github.io/

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:14:30.218Z