Video models answer tutorial questions plausibly while pointing at nothing that supports the answer
AspireAI community · arXiv (NeurIPS 2026 educational track)
Instructional video benchmarks test whether a model recognises actions, not whether it understands how objects change as a procedure proceeds. ProcObject-10K evaluates both: 10,522 open-ended VideoQA pairs grounded in 1,799 videos, spanning 137 tasks across 9 domains and five reasoning types covering preconditions, state evolution, counterfactuals, mistakes and readiness, in both egocentric and exocentric views. Benchmarking 13 leading MLLMs exposed a substantial answering-grounding gap: models produce plausible answers while failing to localise the supporting evidence, with mIoU under 45%, which points to reliance on linguistic priors rather than recognition of object dynamics. The authors add an object-centric supervised fine-tuning baseline with pseudo object-level supervision and spatial-temporal constraints, and models tuned on it improve on the benchmark and transfer to other grounded VideoQA and embodied planning tasks. The dataset, annotations and evaluation toolkit are publicly released.
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Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.