Incentivizing Temporal-Awareness in Egocentric Video Understanding Models
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently shown strong performance in visual understanding, yet they often lack temporal awareness, particularly in egocentric settings. Apple researchers propose Temporal Global Policy Optimization (TGPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm that uses verifiable rewards to incentivize temporal reasoning over frame-level shortcuts.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently shown strong performance in visual understanding, yet they often lack temporal awareness, particularly in egocentric settings where reasoning depends on the correct ordering and evolution of events. This deficiency stems in part from training objectives that fail to explicitly reward temporal reasoning and instead rely on frame-level spatial shortcuts. To address this limitation, we propose Temporal Global Policy Optimization (TGPO), a reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) algorithm designed to incentivize temporal…