ReVA: A Scene-Centric Dataset Beyond Repetition for Remote Sensing Video Question Answering

Zhen Yao, Likai Wang, Yuming Yang, Zhihao Zheng, Bo Lang +7

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable advances in remote sensing. However, existing remote sensing multimodal reasoning benchmarks exhibit two critical limitations: they rely on (i) template-driven questions, which causes repetitive questions; and (ii) static images that fail to capture the inherent temporal nature of drone/UAV videos. This leaves systematic evaluation of remote sensing video reasoning largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce ReVA, a new dataset for remote sensing video question answering, designed to assess spatiotemporal, scene-centric, and reasoning-oriented capabilities of MLLMs. ReVA comprises 2,438 drone videos spanning 18 cities worldwide (580K frames) and 22K high-quality question-answer pairs across 11 challenging QA tasks. We develop a semi-automatic annotation pipeline that leverages Text LLMs and MLLMs for question-answer generation with human verification. We evaluate 23 proprietary and open-source Video LLMs on ReVA, exposing fundamental limitations of current models. These findings position ReVA as a critical benchmark toward better remote sensing video understanding and temporal reasoning capabilities…