# HySTER: A Hybrid Spatio-Temporal Event Reasoner

Source: [HySTER: A Hybrid Spatio-Temporal Event Reasoner](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa691a1e209131cea2041c>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:53:51.580Z

Authors: Theophile Sautory, Nuri Cingillioglu, Alessandra Russo

Published: 2021-01-17T11:07:17.000Z

## Abstract

The task of Video Question Answering (VideoQA) consists in answering natural language questions about a video and serves as a proxy to evaluate the performance of a model in scene sequence understanding. Most methods designed for VideoQA up-to-date are end-to-end deep learning architectures which struggle at complex temporal and causal reasoning and provide limited transparency in reasoning steps. We present the HySTER: a Hybrid Spatio-Temporal Event Reasoner to reason over physical events in videos. Our model leverages the strength of deep learning methods to extract information from video frames with the reasoning capabilities and explainability of symbolic artificial intelligence in an answer set programming framework. We define a method based on general temporal, causal and physics rules which can be transferred across tasks. We apply our model to the CLEVRER dataset and demonstrate state-of-the-art results in question answering accuracy. This work sets the foundations for the incorporation of inductive logic programming in the field of VideoQA.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.06644>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.06644.pdf>)
