English

VideoPASTA: 7K Preference Pairs That Matter for Video-LLM Alignment

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-09-26 v3

Abstract

Video-language models (Video-LLMs) excel at understanding video content but struggle with spatial relationships, temporal ordering, and cross-frame continuity. To address these limitations, we introduce VideoPASTA (Preference Alignment with Spatio-Temporal-Cross Frame Adversaries), a framework that enhances Video-LLMs through targeted preference optimization. VideoPASTA trains models to distinguish accurate video representations from carefully crafted adversarial examples that deliberately violate spatial, temporal, or cross-frame relationships. With only 7,020 preference pairs and Direct Preference Optimization, VideoPASTA enables models to learn robust representations that capture fine-grained spatial details and long-range temporal dynamics. Experiments demonstrate that VideoPASTA is model agnostic and significantly improves performance, for example, achieving gains of up to +3.8 percentage points on LongVideoBench, +4.1 on VideoMME, and +4.0 on MVBench, when applied to various state-of-the-art Video-LLMs. These results demonstrate that targeted alignment, rather than massive pretraining or architectural modifications, effectively addresses core video-language challenges. Notably, VideoPASTA achieves these improvements without any human annotation or captioning, relying solely on 32-frame sampling. This efficiency makes our approach a scalable plug-and-play solution that seamlessly integrates with existing models while preserving their original capabilities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.14096,
  title  = {VideoPASTA: 7K Preference Pairs That Matter for Video-LLM Alignment},
  author = {Yogesh Kulkarni and Pooyan Fazli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.14096},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

EMNLP 2025 (Main)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:03:55.388Z