VideoSSR: Video Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has substantially advanced the video understanding capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, the rapid progress of MLLMs is outpacing the complexity of existing video datasets, while the manual annotation of new, high-quality data remains prohibitively expensive. This work investigates a pivotal question: Can the rich, intrinsic information within videos be harnessed to self-generate high-quality, verifiable training data? To investigate this problem, we first introduce three selfsupervised pretext tasks for video understanding: Anomaly Grounding, Object Counting, and Temporal Jigsaw. To validate the difficulty of these tasks, we construct the Video Intrinsic Understanding Benchmark (VIUBench), revealing that current state-of-the-art MLLMs struggle significantly on these tasks. Building upon these pretext tasks, we develop the VideoSSR-30K dataset and propose VideoSSR, a novel video self-supervised reinforcement learning framework for RLVR. Extensive experiments across 17 benchmarks, spanning four major video domains (General Video QA, Long Video QA, Temporal Grounding, and Complex Reasoning), demonstrate that our VideoSSR consistently enhances model performance, yielding an average improvement of over 5%. These results establish VideoSSR as a potent foundational framework for developing more advanced video understanding in MLLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/lcqysl/VideoSSR.