Vision & Multimodal Sep 2025 · #19 most cited · 194 citations

Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners

Thaddäus Wiedemer et al.

arXiv:2509.20328

In short

The authors test Google’s Veo 3 video model on tasks it was never trained for, such as segmentation, edge detection, image editing, physics understanding and maze solving, just by prompting it. It handles many of them, which they read as early visual reasoning.

Why it matters

It suggests video models may become general vision foundation models the way LLMs did for text.

Read first

The 3 Field Guide ideas this paper leans on.

Starting from scratch? The full route 24 ideas · basics first
  1. Dataset ✓ understood

    A collection of data examples used for training, validating, or testing machine learning models.

  2. Training ✓ understood

    The process of fitting a model to data by repeatedly measuring how wrong its outputs are and adjusting its parameters to reduce that error.

  3. Machine Learning ✓ understood

    Building systems that learn patterns from data instead of following hand-written rules, getting better at a task as they see more examples.

  4. Unsupervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning from unlabeled data to discover hidden patterns, structures, or relationships without explicit target outputs.

  5. Self-Supervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning representations from unlabeled data by creating supervised tasks from the data itself (masked prediction, contrastive learning).

  6. Pre-training ✓ understood

    Training a model on a large dataset (often self-supervised) before fine-tuning on specific tasks, enabling transfer learning.

  7. Transfer Learning ✓ understood

    Leveraging knowledge learned from one task/domain to improve performance on a related task with less data.

  8. Foundation Model · read first ✓ understood

    Large pre-trained models serving as a base for various downstream tasks (GPT, BERT, CLIP, SAM).

  9. Zero-Shot Learning · read first ✓ understood

    A model's ability to perform tasks it wasn't explicitly trained on, using only instructions or descriptions.

  10. Natural Language Processing ✓ understood

    The field of AI that lets computers read, interpret, translate and generate human language, from spam filters and search to chatbots.

  11. Token ✓ understood

    The basic unit of text that a language model processes, typically representing a word, subword, or character. Tokens are the fundamental building blocks for LLM input and output.

  12. Tokenization ✓ understood

    Splitting text into tokens, usually subword pieces, and mapping each to an integer ID so a language model can process it.

  13. Language Modeling ✓ understood

    Learning probability distributions over sequences of words to predict what comes next.

  14. Feature ✓ understood

    A single measurable property of an example, such as a house's floor area or how many links an email contains, used as an input to a model.

  15. Neural Network ✓ understood

    A computational model inspired by biological neural networks, consisting of interconnected nodes (neurons) organized in layers that process information through weighted connections.

  16. Deep Learning ✓ understood

    A subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with multiple layers (deep neural networks) to learn hierarchical representations of data.

  17. Representation Learning ✓ understood

    Learning useful features or representations of data automatically, rather than hand-crafting them.

  18. Embedding ✓ understood

    A list of numbers (a vector) that represents a word, sentence, image or other item, learned so that similar items end up close together.

  19. Attention Mechanism ✓ understood

    A technique that lets a neural network weigh every part of its input when producing each output, focusing on the parts most relevant at that step.

  20. Transformer ✓ understood

    A neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, built from stacked self-attention and feed-forward layers; the basis of nearly every modern large language model.

  21. Large Language Model ✓ understood

    A neural network, almost always a transformer, trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it write, answer, summarize and follow instructions.

  22. Compute ✓ understood

    Informal term for computational resources (GPUs, TPUs, time) required for training or running AI models.

  23. Neural Scaling Laws ✓ understood

    Empirical relationships showing how model performance improves predictably with model size, data, and compute.

  24. Emergent Abilities · read first ✓ understood

    Capabilities that appear suddenly in large language models at certain scales, not present in smaller models.

In the frontier

Rank
#19 of 100
Citations
194
as of Aug 9, 2026
Published
Sep 2025

Topics: Video understanding , Reasoning methods , Vision-language models

Selection: 1kpapers.com by Together AI, most-cited as of Aug 9, 2026

Nearby papers

Summary in our own words; read the paper for the details. ← All papers