Vision-language models (VLMs) are rapidly advancing toward sophisticated grounded structured visual reasoning. Training models for such advanced capabilities demands a new genre of data that seamlessly unifies spatial coordinates, open-vocabulary descriptions, structured attributes, and topological relationships into a singular representation. However, existing data annotation tools fundamentally fail to meet these intricate demands, suffering from three systematic bottlenecks: limited expressiveness, severe annotation-training decoupling, and poor data reusability. To bridge this infrastructure gap, we introduce an open-source annotation tool, ScreenAnnotator. First, we define a unified annotation atom schema that binds spatial, semantic, and structural primitives into a single unit. Second, we implement an on-policy annotation loop embedded with a Bayesian Annotation Verifier (BAV). Finally, we design a template-driven multi-task data synthesis process dynamically transforms static atoms into diverse multi-dimensional reasoning tasks, eliminating redundant re-annotation. The on-policy loop drives the annotation accept rate to nearly 100% on flowcharts and 77% on GUI screenshots, while steadily reducing per-image annotation time as labeled data accumulate. In the flowchart scenario, fine-tuning a VLM yields 76.1% average accuracy, which is a 35.1% point absolute gain. Our code is available at: https://github.com/WnQinm/Annotator.
Han Zhang, Wanting Jiang, Tomasz Kornuta +2cs.CV cs.AI
Training Vision Language Models (VLMs) for video event reasoning requires high-quality structured annotations capturing not only what happened, but when, where, why, and with what consequence, at a scale manual labelling cannot support. We present MAVEN (Multi-stage Agentic Video Event aNnotation), a multi-stage agentic pipeline that turns raw videos into multi-task training data with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning traces, organized around a designated Event of Focus. At its core, MAVEN synthesizes a Multi-Scale Spatio-Temporal Event Description (MSTED) from three complementary caption levels; this explicit intermediate serves as the sole input to downstream Q&A generation across multiple task formats. Crucially, MAVEN supports agent-driven domain adaptation: given a new video dataset and target question examples, the agent redesigns all prompts top-down without manual re-engineering. A hierarchical refinement loop further classifies annotation errors against a taxonomy, traces root causes to the originating pipeline stage, and applies targeted edits that rewrite prompts or modify the pipeline structure itself, iteratively improving data quality. We apply MAVEN to label over 5,300 traffic videos and fine-tune Cosmos-Reason2-8B on the resulting data. On a private CCTV evaluation set, fine-tuning surpasses both Gemini 2.5 Pro and 3.1 Flash, including a $+38.8$-point gain in MCQ accuracy over zero-shot. On AccidentBench, CCTV-only training lifts Cosmos-Reason2 by $+10.7$ MCQ points and matches Gemini 2.5 Pro despite seeing no dashcam videos; adding agent-adapted dashcam annotations narrows the gap to Gemini 3.1 Flash, and RL post-training pushes overall performance past both Gemini baselines. Qualitative results on warehouse surveillance and public safety videos further show the agentic workflow readily adapts the pipeline to new domains.