Video-STR: Reinforcing MLLMs in Video Spatio-Temporal Reasoning with Relation Graph

Abstract: Recent progress in Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) has demonstrated strong semantic understanding capabilities, but struggles to perform precise spatio-temporal understanding. Existing spatio-temporal methods primarily focus on the video itself, while overlooking the physical information within the video, such as multi-object layouts and motion. Such limitations restrict the use of MLLMs in downstream applications that demand high precision, including embodied intelligence and VR. To address this issue, we present Video-STR, a novel graph-based reinforcement method for precise Video Spatio-Temporal Reasoning. Building upon the capacity of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) to improve model abilities, we introduce a reasoning mechanism using graph-based Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) method to guide the model in inferring the underlying spatio-temporal topology of scenarios during the thinking process. To resolve the lack of spatio-temporal training data, we construct the STV-205k dataset with 205k question-answering pairs, covering dynamic multi-object scenes in both indoor and outdoor environments, to support the model training. Experiments show that Video-STR achieves state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks, outperforming the base model by 13% on STI-Bench, and demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach and dataset. Code, model, and data will be released.