English

ReWatch-R1: Boosting Complex Video Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models through Agentic Data Synthesis

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-10-02 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) significantly advances image reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), its application to complex video reasoning remains underdeveloped. This gap stems primarily from a critical data bottleneck: existing datasets lack the challenging, multi-hop questions and high-quality, video-grounded Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data necessary to effectively bootstrap RLVR. To address this, we introduce ReWatch, a large-scale dataset built to foster advanced video reasoning. We propose a novel multi-stage synthesis pipeline to synthesize its three components: ReWatch-Caption, ReWatch-QA, and ReWatch-CoT. A core innovation is our Multi-Agent ReAct framework for CoT synthesis, which simulates a human-like "re-watching" process to generate video-grounded reasoning traces by explicitly modeling information retrieval and verification. Building on this dataset, we develop ReWatch-R1 by post-training a strong baseline LVLM with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and our RLVR framework. This framework incorporates a novel Observation \& Reasoning (O\&R) reward mechanism that evaluates both the final answer's correctness and the reasoning's alignment with video content, directly penalizing hallucination. Our experiments show that ReWatch-R1 achieves state-of-the-art average performance on five challenging video reasoning benchmarks. Project Page: https://rewatch-r1.github.io

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.23652,
  title  = {ReWatch-R1: Boosting Complex Video Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models through Agentic Data Synthesis},
  author = {Congzhi Zhang and Zhibin Wang and Yinchao Ma and Jiawei Peng and Yihan Wang and Qiang Zhou and Jun Song and Bo Zheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.23652},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:02:00.780Z