VAST: Video Ability-Stratified Taxonomy for Data-Efficient Video Reasoning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective approach for improving video reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing methods remain inefficient for two reasons. First, training data are typically organized by task formats rather than underlying reasoning abilities, creating a mismatch that encourages models to learn task-specific patterns instead of transferable capabilities. As a result, improving ability generalization requires broad coverage over many ability-task combinations, making RL training costly. Second, prior work often compensates for this inefficiency with increasingly complex algorithmic designs, such as specialized temporal architectures or multi-objective reward frameworks, which further complicate training. To address these issues, we present VAST, a cognitive taxonomy and data organization framework that structures video understanding into three layers: Perception, Reasoning, and Cognition. Based on this taxonomy, we construct VAST-15K for training and VAST-Bench for evaluation. We further introduce Video-VAST, a reinforcement learning framework that uses consistency rewards to encourage alignment between reasoning traces and final answers, without architectural modifications. Experiments show that VideoVAST achieves 66.3% accuracy on MVBench and 57.4% on VAST-Bench, compared with 62.7% and 54.3% for Video-R1, while using approximately 72% fewer GPU hours and 96% fewer training samples under the same training settings. Code and resources are available at https://zhongan-wang. github.io/VAST.