Researchers at MBZUAI introduce "Interactive Video Reasoning," a new paradigm enabling models to actively "think with videos" by performing iterative visual actions to gather and refine evidence. They developed Video CoM, which reasons through a Chain of Manipulations (CoM), and constructed Video CoM Instruct, an 18K instruction tuning dataset for multi-step manipulation reasoning. The model is further optimized via reinforcement learning with reasoning aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), achieving strong results across nine video reasoning benchmarks.
The paper introduces FanarGuard, a bilingual moderation filter for Arabic and English language models that considers both safety and cultural alignment. A dataset of 468K prompt-response pairs was created and scored by LLM judges on harmlessness and cultural awareness to train the filter. The first benchmark targeting Arabic cultural contexts was developed to evaluate cultural alignment. Why it matters: FanarGuard advances context-sensitive AI safeguards by integrating cultural awareness into content moderation, addressing a critical gap in current alignment techniques.
A new benchmark, ViMUL-Bench, is introduced to evaluate video LLMs across 14 languages, including Arabic, with a focus on cultural inclusivity. The benchmark includes 8k manually verified samples across 15 categories and varying video durations. A multilingual video LLM, ViMUL, is also presented, along with a training set of 1.2 million samples, with both to be publicly released.
KAUST and Japan's NHK have signed an agreement for NHK to film the Red Sea in 8K high-definition as part of the "Deep Ocean" documentary series. The filming will be coordinated with researchers from KAUST's Red Sea Research Center, covering a range of subjects from coral reefs to deep-sea brine pools. The collaboration, initiated in 2019, was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Why it matters: This partnership will showcase the Red Sea's unique biodiversity and KAUST's marine research capabilities to a global audience, highlighting Saudi Arabia's focus on environmental research and its Red Sea giga-projects.