CurEvo: Curriculum-Guided Self-Evolution for Video Understanding

arXiv:2604.26707v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent self-evolution frameworks for video understanding have demonstrated the potential for autonomous improvement from unlabeled videos. However, existing approaches often suffer from weakly controlled optimization and capability progression because they lack structured guidance for generating, evaluating, and reusing supervision throughout the iterative learning process. We present CurEvo, a curriculum-guided self-evolution framework that organizes this loop as a competence-aware progression. Curriculum-Guided Self-Evolution maintains a competence-aware curriculum state and cumulative training pool across iterations. Within this loop, Multi-Dimensional Question Generation supplies complementary supervision, from directly verifiable structural questions for perception to type-conditioned questions for recognition and understanding. Type-Adaptive Evaluation separately assesses question quality and answer reliability with criteria matched to each type's evidence; its scores determine which pairs enter the pool and how the next curriculum state is updated. Across seven backbones and four VideoQA benchmarks, CurEvo consistently improves benchmark accuracy and benchmark semantic score. For Qwen2.5-VL(7B), accuracy rises from 67.84% to 69.91% on ActivityNet-QA and from 76.94% to 79.61% on NExT-QA. CurEvo thus establishes self-generated supervision as a stable route to autonomous video understanding without task-specific human QA annotations during self-evolution.