Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong progress in video understanding, yet it remains challenging because the token limitation makes MLLMs difficult to capture temporally sparse evidence. Existing methods typically rely on uniform sampling, or frame selection, but these strategies usually optimize either broad temporal coverage or local relevance, making it difficult to preserve both global storyline context and fine-grained evidence.
arXiv:2608.05592v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made strong progress in video understanding, yet long videos remain difficult: the visual token budge...
arXiv:2608.27871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-video understanding remains challenging for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) due to limited context length. Uniform sampling may miss cruc...
STRAND is a new benchmark that tests multimodal large language models’ ability to track objects, their states, and relationships over time in videos. It evaluates intermediate reasoning by breaking queries into sub‑questions and uses Faithful Accuracy to ensure all parts of an answer are correct. The authors also propose an object‑centric framework that builds structured trajectories and shows reduced hallucinations and better temporal consistency compared to existing models.
arXiv:2610.00757v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-video question answering is limited by the high cost of visual tokens and by the fixed context width of current VLMs. A long-video question may re...
The paper introduces structured video prompting, a training‑free inference‑time technique that augments input videos with lightweight spatial and temporal structure to provide explicit anchors for evidence organization. By applying this method to two video benchmarks and two open video‑language models, the authors demonstrate performance improvements across several tasks, with gains varying by model and task. The study suggests that failures in video‑language models stem not only from reasoning capacity but also from how video evidence is presented during inference.
arXiv:2608.29958v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long videos contain far more visual content than Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can process under a fixed visual-token budget, making frame selec...
The paper introduces STITCH, a training‑free method that partitions videos into semantically meaningful temporal chunks using a frozen video‑text backbone. By detecting changes in the embedding sequence of short video windows, STITCH produces reusable temporal abstractions that can be applied to multiple tasks such as event boundary detection, language‑based moment retrieval, and frame selection for vision‑language models. Experiments show that STITCH performs competitively with specialized methods while requiring no task‑specific training, especially when processing is limited to a few frames or tokens.
The paper introduces PACE, a factor-guided, progressive framework for acquiring evidence in long-video question answering. PACE first indexes clip-level descriptions using question-derived factors, then refines evidence retrieval with contrastive cues derived from candidate answers. On the MMR‑V dataset, PACE achieves 42.6% accuracy and recovers 66.9% of annotated cues, outperforming direct inference and prior agentic baselines, and shows consistent improvements across several long-video benchmarks.
Long-video understanding remains challenging for multimodal large language models, because temporally extended videos often contain thousands of frames and are therefore expensive to process exhaustively. Existing methods usually construct compact visual inputs from long videos under a limited visual budget.
arXiv:2604.17422v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long video understanding remains a formidable challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) due to the prohibitive cost of processing dens...
arXiv:2608.28699v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding long-form video remains a fundamental challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Sparse frame sampling fails to capture fine...
arXiv:2608.23011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) provides a scalable paradigm for long-video understanding, but existing systems typically inherit a...