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
- Dataset ✓ understood
A collection of data examples used for training, validating, or testing machine learning models.
- 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.
- 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.
- Unsupervised Learning ✓ understood
Learning from unlabeled data to discover hidden patterns, structures, or relationships without explicit target outputs.
- Self-Supervised Learning ✓ understood
Learning representations from unlabeled data by creating supervised tasks from the data itself (masked prediction, contrastive learning).
- Pre-training ✓ understood
Training a model on a large dataset (often self-supervised) before fine-tuning on specific tasks, enabling transfer learning.
- Transfer Learning ✓ understood
Leveraging knowledge learned from one task/domain to improve performance on a related task with less data.
- Foundation Model · read first ✓ understood
Large pre-trained models serving as a base for various downstream tasks (GPT, BERT, CLIP, SAM).
- Zero-Shot Learning · read first ✓ understood
A model's ability to perform tasks it wasn't explicitly trained on, using only instructions or descriptions.
- 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.
- 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.
- Tokenization ✓ understood
Splitting text into tokens, usually subword pieces, and mapping each to an integer ID so a language model can process it.
- Language Modeling ✓ understood
Learning probability distributions over sequences of words to predict what comes next.
- 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.
- 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.
- Deep Learning ✓ understood
A subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with multiple layers (deep neural networks) to learn hierarchical representations of data.
- Representation Learning ✓ understood
Learning useful features or representations of data automatically, rather than hand-crafting them.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Compute ✓ understood
Informal term for computational resources (GPUs, TPUs, time) required for training or running AI models.
- Neural Scaling Laws ✓ understood
Empirical relationships showing how model performance improves predictably with model size, data, and compute.
- 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