Chains That See, Answers That Don't: A Multi-Aspect Evaluation Recipe for Forced Chain-of-Thought on Video-MME
Forced chain-of-thought (CoT) is widely assumed to make vision-language models more reliable on video question answering. We propose a small three-probe evaluation recipe to test that assumption: paired accuracy across direct, CoT, answer-first, and no-video conditions; a counterfactual video-swap diagnostic over the CoT chains; and a four-rung visual-degradation ladder. Each probe is reported under both a strict and a permissive regex scorer, with multiplicity correction over a manuscript-declared primary family. Applied to Qwen2.5-VL on Video-MME subsets, the recipe returns a two-part finding. The CoT chains are strongly video-conditioned: swapping the input video collapses chain overla...
| Authors | Zhichao Fan, Yanhang Li, Zexin Zhuang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 22 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 June 2026 |
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