GroundedVDR: Grounding Video-to-Web Evidence Dependencies in Video Deep Research

Xiyuan Liang, Yu Wang, Zuhao Yang, Ziting Wang, Duo Li +5

Video large multimodal models have improved at identifying cross-frame visual evidence and conducting open-web retrieval, as reflected in recent video deep research (VDR) benchmarks. However, existing VDR benchmarks primarily evaluate tool-use trajectories and final responses without verifying whether a model actually uses the temporal video information or the retrieved web evidence. To fill this gap, we introduce \method{}, an evidence-grounded benchmark with three features. First, it combines human review with restricted-access probing across multiple models to exclude questions answerable from parametric knowledge or a single information source. Second, each question carries structured video-to-web evidence annotations that link the relevant video segments to their supporting web evidence. Third, its evaluation protocol separately scores video grounding, web evidence grounding, and final-answer correctness. Across eight multimodal agent systems, the best reaches 76.0\% answer accuracy, yet none recovers the complete required web evidence for more than 8\% of questions. Our benchmark is publicly available at \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/hh721/vdr_temp}.