Moment-Video: Diagnosing Temporal Fidelity of Video MLLMs on Momentary Visual Events

Abstract

Video multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress in general and long-form video understanding, yet their ability to capture and use brief, answer-critical visual evidence remains underexplored. Momentary actions or state transitions may determine an answer while occupying only a small fraction of the video. Performance on broad video understanding tasks alone does not establish whether models can reliably identify and use this temporally localized evidence. We introduce Moment-Video, a benchmark for evaluating temporal fidelity through momentary visual event understanding. Questions are constructed around visually observable events or event sequences, requiring models to notice, count, describe, or reason about transient evidence. The benchmark contains 1,000 human-verified video-QA pairs across seven domains and 25 subcategories, covering four tasks: Temporal Occurrence, Temporal Counting, Action Description, and Temporal Reasoning. We evaluate 34 proprietary and open-source MLLMs. Under the main evaluation settings, the best-performing model, Seed-2.0-Pro, achieves 39.6% overall accuracy, while most open-source models remain below 25%. Diagnostic analyses show that denser frame sampling improves some models, but substantial errors persist even when sampled frames cover all annotated necessary event intervals in an audited subset. Performance also declines on longer videos, suggesting additional temporal-localization challenges. By exposing these limitations, Moment-Video provides a diagnostic benchmark to guide the evaluation and development of video MLLMs that more reliably understand brief, answer-critical visual events.