POVQA: Preference-Optimized Video Question Answering

Abstract

We introduce POVQA, a data-efficient pipeline for video question answering that addresses the critical challenge of long video understanding. Our method compresses each second of video into a single temporally pooled image via motion blur and weighted averaging variants, then aligns Large Vision-Language Models with lightweight supervision. We achieve a 23× reduction in context tokens while maintaining comprehensive temporal coverage. Using our novel ReasonVQA dataset with only 239 human-annotated QA pairs, we demonstrate dramatic improvements: F1 score from 0.212 to 0.543, BLEU-4 from 0.031 to 0.291, and ROUGE-L from 0.196 to 0.528. Zero-shot evaluation on TVQA achieves 64.7% accuracy, surpassing prior zero-shot methods.

Resources

Paper

The current public paper version is the arXiv preprint.

Read on arXiv

Code

The full training, evaluation, preprocessing, and visualization code is available on GitHub.

Open the repository

Preprocessed Dataset

The released Hugging Face dataset contains the preprocessed frame bundles and subtitle-frame alignment metadata used by POVQA.

Browse the dataset

Annotations

ReasonVQA annotations are available directly from this project page as a zip archive.

Download annotations.zip

Key Results

23×

Token Reduction

156%

F1 Improvement

64.7%

TVQA Zero-shot (SFT/DPO on ReasonVQA)

69.7%

TVQA Zero-shot (Pooling Only)

239

Training Samples

12

Genres of movies covered

Qualitative Results

Representative examples showing POVQA's reasoning capabilities and temporal understanding across different video contexts.

Example 1: Character Interaction

Multi-character dialogue scene with temporal pooling visualization

Example 2: Action Sequence

Motion-heavy scene with blend blur pooling effectiveness

Example 3: Temporal Reasoning

Long sequence requiring understanding of temporal relationships

Example 4: Cross-Modal Understanding

Short scene with both textual and visual cues

More example from tvqa

Example from movies tvqa

More example from movies

Example from movies ReasonVQA

More example from movies

Example from movies ReasonVQA

Method Overview

POVQA tackles the challenge of processing long videos (up to 5 minutes) within LLM context limits through intelligent temporal pooling. Our pipeline consists of four key innovations:

Temporal Pooling: Four novel operators (Blend Blur, Weighted Average, Exponential, Ramp) compress 24-60 frames into single representative images.

Subtitle Alignment: Interleaved text-image sequences maintain temporal coherence while maximizing information density.

Rationale Supervision: Two-stage fine-tuning with reasoning chains and direct preference optimization.

POVQA Pipeline

Raw Video → Temporal Pooling → Subtitle Alignment → QLoRA SFT → DPO → Enhanced VQA

Performance Comparison

Method	F1 Score	BLEU-4	ROUGE-L	Embed Cosine
Baseline (No Fine-tuning)	0.212	0.031	0.196	0.383
POVQA (SFT Only)	0.545	0.278	0.520	0.632
POVQA (SFT + DPO)	0.543	0.291	0.528	0.631

Zero-shot TVQA Performance

Method	Zero-shot	Accuracy (%)
POVQA (Ours)	✓	64.7
FrozenBiLM (w/ speech)	✓	59.7
GPT-4V	✓	57.8
IG-VLM (LLaVA-1.6 34B)	✓	51.1
Goldfish-7B (vision+subs)	✓	46.9
Q-ViD	✓	41.0

Citation

Please cite the current arXiv version for now. This can be updated once the workshop proceedings citation is available.

@article{dahal2025povqa,
  title   = {POVQA: Preference-Optimized Video Question Answering with Rationales for Data Efficiency},
  author  = {Dahal, Ashim and Ghimire, Ankit and Murad, Saydul Akbar and Rahimi, Nick},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.01009},
  year    = {2025},
  url     = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01009}
}