TimeSearch-R: Adaptive Temporal Search for Long-Form Video Understanding via Self-Verification Reinforcement Learning

Temporal search aims to identify a minimal set of relevant frames from tens of thousands based on a given query, serving as a foundation for accurate long-form video understanding. Many existing works attempt to progressively narrow the search space. However, these approaches typically rely on a hand-crafted search process, lacking end-to-end optimization for learning optimal search strategies. In this paper, we propose TimeSearch-R, which reformulates temporal search as interleaved text–video thinking, seamlessly integrating searching video clips into the reasoning process through reinforcement learning (RL). However, applying RL training methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), to video reasoning can result in unsupervised intermediate search decisions. This leads to insufficient exploration of the video content and inconsistent logical reasoning. To address these issues, we introduce GRPO with Completeness Self-Verification (GRPO-CSV), which gathers searched video frames from the interleaved reasoning process and utilizes the same policy model to verify the adequacy of searched frames, thereby improving the completeness of video reasoning. Additionally, we construct datasets specifically designed for the SFT cold-start and RL training of GRPO-CSV, filtering out samples with weak temporal dependencies to enhance task difficulty and improve temporal search capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeSearch-R achieves substantial improvements on temporal search benchmarks such as Haystack-LVBench and Haystack-Ego4D, long-form video understanding benchmarks like VideoMME, MLVU, and LongVideoBench, as well as video reasoning benchmarks such as Video-Holmes, consistently and significantly outperforming other existing temporal search approaches and text-only reasoning models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Time-Search/TimeSearch-R.