arXiv:2508.21010cs.CVcs.AI2025-08

用因果链拆解视频问答,让推理过程可解释、可复用。

ChainReaction: Causal Chain-Guided Reasoning for Modular and Explainable Causal-Why Video Question Answering

  • 将因果推理与答案生成分离,用自然语言链表征因果过程。
  • 在3个基准上超越现有模型,46K样本经人工验证因果链准确。
  • 适合需要透明推理的医疗、教育等高可信场景使用。

现有因果型视频问答模型在高阶推理上表现不佳,依赖黑箱单体流程,混淆视频理解、因果推断与答案生成。本文提出一种模块化新范式,显式分离因果推理与答案生成,引入自然语言因果链作为可解释的中间表示。受人类认知启发,这些结构化的因果序列连接低层视频内容与高层因果推理,实现透明且逻辑连贯的推断。采用两阶段架构:因果链提取器(CCE)从视频-问题对生成因果链,因果链驱动回答器(CCDA)基于链生成答案。针对标注推理轨迹缺失问题,提出可扩展方法,从现有数据集生成准确因果链,并构建46,000条经人工验证的因果链。同时提出用于因果导向描述的新评估指标CauCo。在三个大规模基准上的实验表明,该方法不仅显著优于当前最优模型,还在可解释性、用户信任与泛化能力上取得提升,使CCE可作为跨领域的可复用因果推理引擎。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Existing Causal-Why Video Question Answering (VideoQA) models often struggle with higher-order reasoning, relying on opaque, monolithic pipelines that entangle video understanding, causal inference, and answer generation. These black-box approaches offer limited interpretability and tend to depend on shallow heuristics. We propose a novel, modular paradigm that explicitly decouples causal reasoning from answer generation, introducing natural language causal chains as interpretable intermediate representations. Inspired by human cognitive models, these structured cause-effect sequences bridge low-level video content with high-level causal reasoning, enabling transparent and logically coherent inference. Our two-stage architecture comprises a Causal Chain Extractor (CCE) that generates causal chains from video-question pairs, and a Causal Chain-Driven Answerer (CCDA) that derives answers grounded in these chains. To address the lack of annotated reasoning traces, we introduce a scalable method for generating accurate causal chains from existing datasets. We construct human verified causal chains for 46K samples. We also propose CauCo, a new evaluation metric for causality-oriented captioning. Experiments on three large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms state-of-the-art models, but also yields substantial gains in explainability, user trust, and generalization -- positioning the CCE as a reusable causal reasoning engine across diverse domains. Project page: https://paritoshparmar.github.io/chainreaction/

视频问答因果推理可解释性模块化

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