SciEducator: Scientific Video Understanding and Educating via Deming-Cycle Multi-Agent System

TL;DR

SciEducator introduces an iterative multi-agent system inspired by the Deming Cycle for scientific video understanding and education, enabling detailed reasoning and multimodal content generation, significantly surpassing existing models.

Contribution

It is the first to apply a Deming Cycle-inspired multi-agent framework to scientific video comprehension and education, integrating external knowledge and step-wise reasoning.

Findings

Outperforms leading MLLMs and video agents on SciVBench.

Successfully generates multimodal educational content.

Demonstrates effective scientific reasoning in videos.

Abstract

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and video agent systems have significantly improved general video understanding. However, when applied to scientific video understanding and educating, a domain that demands external professional knowledge integration and rigorous step-wise reasoning, existing approaches often struggle. To bridge this gap, we propose SciEducator, the first iterative self-evolving multi-agent system for scientific video comprehension and education. Rooted in the classical Deming Cycle from management science, our design reformulates its Plan-Do-Study-Act philosophy into a self-evolving reasoning and feedback mechanism, which facilitates the interpretation of intricate scientific activities in videos. Moreover, SciEducator can produce multimodal educational content tailored to specific scientific processes, including textual instructions, visual guides, audio narrations, and interactive references. To support evaluation, we construct SciVBench, a benchmark consisting of 500 expert-verified and literature-grounded science QA pairs across five categories, covering physical, chemical, and everyday phenomena. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SciEducator substantially outperforms leading closed-source MLLMs (e.g., Gemini, GPT-4o) and state-of-the-art video agents on the benchmark, establishing a new paradigm for the community.