In classical AI, perception relies on learning state-based representations, while planning -- temporal reasoning over action sequences -- is typically achieved through search. We study whether such reasoning can instead emerge from representations that capture both perceptual and temporal structure. We show that standard temporal contrastive learning, despite its popularity, often fails to capture temporal structure due to its reliance on spurious features. To address this, we introduce Contrastive Representations for Temporal Reasoning (CRTR), a method that uses a negative sampling scheme to provably remove these spurious features and facilitate temporal reasoning. CRTR achieves strong results on domains with complex temporal structure, such as Sokoban and Rubik's Cube. In particular, for the Rubik's Cube, CRTR learns representations that generalize across all initial states and allow it to solve the puzzle using fewer search steps than BestFS -- though with longer solutions. To our knowledge, this is the first method that efficiently solves arbitrary Cube states using only learned representations, without relying on an external search algorithm.

Temporal reasoning is pivotal for Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend the real world. However, existing works neglect the real-world challenges for temporal reasoning: (1) intensive temporal information, (2) fast-changing event dynamics, and (3) complex temporal dependencies in social interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-level benchmark TIME, designed for temporal reasoning in real-world scenarios. TIME consists of 38,522 QA pairs, covering 3 levels with 11 fine-grained sub-tasks. This benchmark encompasses 3 sub-datasets reflecting different real-world challenges: TIME-WIKI, TIME-NEWS, and TIMEDIAL. We conduct extensive experiments on reasoning models and non-reasoning models. And we conducted an in-depth analysis of temporal reasoning performance across diverse real-world scenarios and tasks, and summarized the impact of test-time scaling on temporal reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we release TIME-LITE, a human-annotated subset to foster future research and standardized evaluation in temporal reasoning.

Transformers have gained attention in atmospheric time series forecasting (ATSF) for their ability to capture global spatial-temporal correlations. However, their complex architectures lead to excessive parameter counts and extended training times, limiting their scalability to large-scale forecasting. In this paper, we revisit ATSF from a theoretical perspective of atmospheric dynamics and uncover a key insight: spatial-temporal position embedding (STPE) can inherently model spatialtemporal correlations even without attention mechanisms. Its effectiveness arises from the integration of geographical coordinates and temporal features, which are intrinsically linked to atmospheric dynamics. Based on this, we propose STELLA, a Spatial-Temporal knowledge Embedded Lightweight modeL for ASTF, utilizing only STPE and an MLP architecture in place of Transformer layers. With 10k parameters and one hour of training, STELLA achieves superior performance on five datasets compared to other advanced methods. The paper emphasizes the effectiveness of spatial-temporal knowledge integration over complex architectures, providing novel insights for ATSF. The code is available at https://github.

Recent advances in text-to-video diffusion models have enabled high-quality video synthesis, but controllable generation remains challenging--particularly under limited data and compute. Existing fine-tuning methods for conditional generation often rely on external encoders or architectural modifications, which demand large datasets and are typically restricted to spatially aligned conditioning, limiting flexibility and scalability. In this work, we introduce Temporal In-Context FineTuning (TIC-FT), an efficient and versatile approach with temporal reasoning for adapting pretrained video diffusion models to diverse conditional generation tasks. Our key idea is to concatenate condition and target frames along the temporal axis and insert intermediate buffer frames with progressively increasing noise levels. These buffer frames enable smooth transitions, aligning the fine-tuning process with the pretrained model's temporal dynamics. TIC-FT is architecture-agnostic and achieves strong performance with as few as 10-30 training samples.

In classical AI, perception relies on learning state-based representations, while planning --- temporal reasoning over action sequences --- is typically achieved through search. We study whether such reasoning can instead emerge from representations that capture both perceptual and temporal structure. We show that standard temporal contrastive learning, despite its popularity, often fails to capture temporal structure due to its reliance on spurious features. To address this, we introduce Contrastive Representations for Temporal Reasoning (CRTR), a method that uses a negative sampling scheme to provably remove these spurious features and facilitate temporal reasoning. CRTR achieves strong results on domains with complex temporal structure, such as Sokoban and Rubik's Cube. In particular, for the Rubik's Cube, CRTR learns representations that generalize across all initial states and allow it to solve the puzzle using fewer search steps than BestFS -- though with longer solutions. To our knowledge, this is the first method that efficiently solves arbitrary Cube states using only learned representations, without relying on an external search algorithm.

Temporal reasoning is pivotal for Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend the real world. However, existing works neglect the real-world challenges for temporal reasoning: (1) intensive temporal information, (2) fast-changing event dynamics, and (3) complex temporal dependencies in social interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-level benchmark TimE, designed for temporal reasoning in real-world scenarios. TimE consists of 38,522 QA pairs, covering 3 levels with 11 fine-grained sub-tasks. This benchmark encompasses 3 sub-datasets reflecting different real-world challenges: TimE-Wiki, TimE-News, and TimE-Dial. We conduct extensive experiments on reasoning models and non-reasoning models. And we conducted an in-depth analysis of temporal reasoning performance across diverse real-world scenarios and tasks, and summarized the impact of test-time scaling on temporal reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we release TimE-Lite, a human-annotated subset to foster future research and standardized evaluation in temporal reasoning.

Online, real-time, and fine-grained 3D segmentation constitutes a fundamental capability for embodied intelligent agents to perceive and comprehend their operational environments. Recent advancements employ predefined object queries to aggregate semantic information from Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) outputs that are lifted into 3D point clouds, facilitating spatial information propagation through inter-query interactions. Nevertheless, perception, whether human or robotic, is an inherently dynamic process, rendering temporal understanding a critical yet overlooked dimension within these prevailing query-based pipelines. This deficiency in temporal reasoning can exacerbate issues such as the over-segmentation commonly produced by VFMs, necessitating more handcrafted post-processing. Therefore, to further unlock the temporal environmental perception capabilities of embodied agents, our work reconceptualizes online 3D segmentation as an instance tracking problem (AutoSeg3D).

However, the availability of such resources remains scarce and evaluation faces added complexity due to reproducibility issues in experimental protocols.

Reasoning over TKGs has two challenges: 1.

This form of reasoning, requiring advanced understanding of cause-and-effect relationships across video segments, poses significant challenges to even the frontier multimodal large language models. To facilitate this evaluation, we develop an automated pipeline for generating temporal reasoning question-answer pairs, significantly reducing the need for labor-intensive manual annotations. Our benchmark includes 921 carefully vetted validation samples and 2,143 test samples, each manually curated for accuracy and relevance. Evaluation results show that while frontier large language models outperform academic models, they still lag behind human performance by a significant 14.3% accuracy gap. Additionally, our pipeline creates a training dataset of 9,695 machine generated samples without manual effort, which empirical studies suggest can enhance the across-time reasoning via fine-tuning.