NExT-QA
Models answer causal, temporal and descriptive questions about short videos of daily life. Labs usually report the multiple choice split.
In the authors’ words
We introduce NExT-QA, a rigorously designed video question answering (VideoQA) benchmark to advance video understanding from describing to explaining the temporal actions. Based on the dataset, we set up multi-choice and open-ended QA tasks targeting causal action reasoning, temporal action reasoning, and common scene comprehension. Through extensive analysis of baselines and established VideoQA techniques, we find that top-performing methods excel at shallow scene descriptions but are weak in causal and temporal action reasoning. Furthermore, the models that are effective on multi-choice QA, when adapted to open-ended QA, still struggle in generalizing the answers. This raises doubt on the ability of these models to reason and highlights possibilities for improvement. With detailed results for different question types and heuristic observations for future works, we hope NExT-QA will guide the next generation of VQA research to go beyond superficial scene description towards a deeper understanding of videos. (The dataset and related resources are available at https://github.com/doc-doc/NExT-QA.git)
- Level
- Everyday Most adults, without training
- Scored
- Checked automatically A program checks the result against an answer key, unit tests or the expected final state.
- Answers
- Multiple choice
LongCat-Flash-Omni leads with 86.2%
Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | | 86.2% | Oct 2025 | Model card |
The best score passed 85% in Oct 2025
All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.
Labs dropped it from launch posts once the best score passed 85%
Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.
| Date | Launch post | Score | As the post writes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31 Oct 2025 | 86.2 | NextQA |
One system card reports it
Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.
| Date | Document | Score | As the document writes it | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 31 Oct 2025 | | 86.2 | NextQA (Table 6) | Capabilities |
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