Demystifying Video Reasoning
Recent advances in video generation have revealed an unexpected phenomenon: diffusion-based video models exhibit non-trivial reasoning capabilities. Prior work attributes this to a Chain-of-Frames (CoF) mechanism, where reasoning is assumed to unfold sequentially across video frames. In this work, we challenge this assumption and uncover a fundamentally different mechanism. We show that reasoning in video models instead primarily emerges along the diffusion denoising steps. Through qualitative analysis and targeted probing experiments, we find that models explore multiple candidate solutions in early denoising steps and progressively converge to a final answer, a process we term Chain-of-...
| Authors | Ruisi Wang, Zhongang Cai, Fanyi Pu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 17 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 July 2026 |
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