CAViAR: Critic-Augmented Video Agentic Reasoning

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission13436 Authors

Keywords: video, reasoning

TL;DR: CAViAR achieves strong video reasoning capabilities via an LLM agent adaptively invoking video modules with a critic to select good reasoning paths.

Abstract: Video understanding has seen significant progress in recent years, with models' performance on perception from short clips continuing to rise. Yet, multiple recent benchmarks, such as LVBench, Neptune, and ActivityNet-RTL, show performance wanes for tasks requiring complex reasoning on videos as queries grow more complex and videos grow longer. In this work, we ask: can existing perception capabilities be leveraged to successfully perform more complex video reasoning? In particular, we develop a large language model agent given access to video modules as subagents or tools. Rather than following a fixed procedure to solve queries as in previous work such as Visual Programming, ViperGPT, and MoReVQA, the agent uses the results of each call to a module to determine subsequent steps. Inspired by work in the textual reasoning domain, we introduce a critic to distinguish between instances of successful and unsuccessful sequences from the agent. We show that the combination of our agent and critic achieve strong performance on the previously-mentioned datasets.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

Submission Number: 13436