MetaphorVU: Towards Metaphorical Video Understanding

Zhuoqun Li; Boxi Cao; Guiping Jiang; Fangrui Lv; Ruotong Pan; Jianan Wang; Xiangyu Wu; Hongyu Lin; Yaojie Lu; Yong Du; Ruyin Jia; Liyan; Tingting Gao; Han Li; Xianpei Han; Le Sun

arXiv · 2605.25461

MetaphorVU: Towards Metaphorical Video Understanding

Zhuoqun Li·Boxi Cao·Guiping Jiang·Fangrui Lv·Ruotong Pan·Jianan Wang·Xiangyu Wu·Hongyu Lin·Yaojie Lu·Yong Du·Ruyin Jia·Liyan·Tingting Gao·Han Li·Xianpei Han·Le Sun

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Abstract

Metaphorical videos are prevalent across various real-world scenarios to convey complex ideas, and understanding them typically requires high-order cognitive capabilities. The lack of systematic studies on metaphorical video understanding not only constrains the real-world applicability of MLLMs but also impedes the thorough assessment of their high-order cognitive capabilities. To bridge this gap, we propose MetaphorVU-Bench, the first systematic and comprehensive benchmark dedicated to metaphorical video understanding. Through experiments, we find current MLLMs struggle with accurate metaphorical video understanding, lagging far behind human level, primarily due to defective cross-domain mapping. Motivated by this finding, we construct a metaphor knowledge graph as mapping augmentation and propose MetaphorBoost, an inference-time enhancement framework achieving consistent performance improvement. Our benchmark, analysis, and method provide useful insights and a foundation for future research on advancing MLLMs.

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Zhuoqun Li, Boxi Cao, Guiping Jiang, Fangrui Lv, Ruotong Pan, Jianan Wang, Xiangyu Wu, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Yong Du, Ruyin Jia, Liyan, Tingting Gao, Han Li, Xianpei Han, Le Sun. 2026-05-25. MetaphorVU: Towards Metaphorical Video Understanding. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25461

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