Eric Peh

Chen Li, Chinthani Sugandhika, Yeo Keat Ee et al.

Existing human motion Q\&A methods rely on explicit program execution, where the requirement for manually defined functional modules may limit the scalability and adaptability. To overcome this, we propose an implicit program-guided motion reasoning (IMoRe) framework that unifies reasoning across multiple query types without manually designed modules. Unlike existing implicit reasoning approaches that infer reasoning operations from question words, our model directly conditions on structured program functions, ensuring a more precise execution of reasoning steps. Additionally, we introduce a program-guided reading mechanism, which dynamically selects multi-level motion representations from a pretrained motion Vision Transformer (ViT), capturing both high-level semantics and fine-grained motion cues. The reasoning module iteratively refines memory representations, leveraging structured program functions to extract relevant information for different query types. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on Babel-QA and generalizes to a newly constructed motion Q\&A dataset based on HuMMan, demonstrating its adaptability across different motion reasoning datasets. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/LUNAProject22/IMoRe.

Paritosh Parmar, Eric Peh, Ruirui Chen et al.

Causal video question answering (QA) has garnered increasing interest, yet existing datasets often lack depth in causal reasoning. To address this gap, we capitalize on the unique properties of cartoons and construct CausalChaos!, a novel, challenging causal Why-QA dataset built upon the iconic "Tom and Jerry" cartoon series. Cartoons use the principles of animation that allow animators to create expressive, unambiguous causal relationships between events to form a coherent storyline. Utilizing these properties, along with thought-provoking questions and multi-level answers (answer and detailed causal explanation), our questions involve causal chains that interconnect multiple dynamic interactions between characters and visual scenes. These factors demand models to solve more challenging, yet well-defined causal relationships. We also introduce hard incorrect answer mining, including a causally confusing version that is even more challenging. While models perform well, there is much room for improvement, especially, on open-ended answers. We identify more advanced/explicit causal relationship modeling & joint modeling of vision and language as the immediate areas for future efforts to focus upon. Along with the other complementary datasets, our new challenging dataset will pave the way for these developments in the field.

Chen Li, Eric Peh, Basura Fernando

Recent advances in large vision-language models (VLMs) have shown significant promise for 3D scene understanding. Existing VLM-based approaches typically align 3D scene features with the VLM's embedding space. However, this implicit alignment often yields suboptimal performance due to the scarcity of 3D data and the inherent complexity of spatial relationships in 3D environments. To address these limitations, we propose a novel hierarchical multimodal representation for 3D scene reasoning that explicitly aligns with VLMs at the input space by leveraging both multi-view images and text descriptions. The text descriptions capture spatial relationships by referencing the 3D coordinates of detected objects, while the multi-view images include a top-down perspective and four directional views (forward, left, right, and backward), ensuring comprehensive scene coverage. Additionally, we introduce a hierarchical feature representation that aggregates patch-level image features into view-level and scene-level representations, enabling the model to reason over both local and global scene context. Experimental results on both situated 3D Q&A and general 3D Q&A benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Paritosh Parmar, Eric Peh, Basura Fernando

Existing Causal-Why Video Question Answering (VideoQA) models often struggle with higher-order reasoning, relying on opaque, monolithic pipelines that entangle video understanding, causal inference, and answer generation. These black-box approaches offer limited interpretability and tend to depend on shallow heuristics. We propose a novel, modular framework that explicitly decouples causal reasoning from answer generation, introducing natural language causal chains as interpretable intermediate representations. Inspired by human cognitive models, these structured cause-effect sequences bridge low-level video content with high-level causal reasoning, enabling transparent and logically coherent inference. Our two-stage architecture comprises a Causal Chain Extractor (CCE) that generates causal chains from video-question pairs, and a Causal Chain-Driven Answerer (CCDA) that produces answers grounded in these chains. To address the lack of annotated reasoning traces, we introduce a scalable method for generating high-quality causal chains from existing datasets using large language models. We also propose CauCo, a new evaluation metric for causality-oriented captioning. Experiments on three large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms state-of-the-art models, but also yields substantial gains in explainability, user trust, and generalization -- positioning the CCE as a reusable causal reasoning engine across diverse domains. Project page: https://paritoshparmar.github.io/chainreaction/

Paritosh Parmar, Eric Peh, Basura Fernando

We introduce the novel concept of visually Connecting Actions and Their Effects (CATE) in video understanding. CATE can have applications in areas like task planning and learning from demonstration. We identify and explore two different aspects of the concept of CATE: Action Selection (AS) and Effect-Affinity Assessment (EAA), where video understanding models connect actions and effects at semantic and fine-grained levels, respectively. We design various baseline models for AS and EAA. Despite the intuitive nature of the task, we observe that models struggle, and humans outperform them by a large margin. Our experiments show that in solving AS and EAA, models learn intuitive properties like object tracking and pose encoding without explicit supervision. We demonstrate that CATE can be an effective self-supervised task for learning video representations from unlabeled videos. The study aims to showcase the fundamental nature and versatility of CATE, with the hope of inspiring advanced formulations and models.