arXiv Computer Vision

Allocate Before You Embed: Adaptive Visual Input Allocation for Video Embeddings

The paper introduces AllocEmbed, an allocate‑then‑embed framework that reallocates a fixed visual‑input budget across more video frames to improve retrieval performance. A lightweight allocator uses low‑cost previews to assign frame‑wise resolutions before the embedding backbone, preserving detail where it most benefits retrieval while reducing visual cost elsewhere. Retrieval‑Driven Policy Optimization (RDPO) learns the allocator directly from retrieval feedback, and the method integrates with existing systems without modifying the embedding model.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Intrinsic Temporal Adaptation of CLIP for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval

The paper introduces Intrinsic Temporal Adaptation (ITA) for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR), a task that seeks untrimmed videos containing moments relevant to a text query. ITA employs a Backbone-Internal Temporal Adaptation that lets the final visual transformer layers attend to neighboring frames, creating temporally aware embeddings while keeping CLIP frozen. Additionally, an Affinity-Weighted Gradient Propagation technique softly aggregates top‑k frames based on text‑frame affinities to better handle the weakly supervised nature of PRVR, leading to state‑of‑the‑art performance and more accurate frame‑level evidence retrieval.

By Hyun Seok Seong, Woojin Jun, SuBeen Lee, Jae-Pil Heo
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 19

SPARE: Shared Perception and Adaptive Retrieval of Evidence for Streaming Video Understanding

SPARE is a framework for streaming video understanding that adaptively retrieves historical evidence when recent observations are insufficient to answer a question. It uses a lightweight gate to decide when to fetch relevant past clips via a multimodal embedding model, and trains the system with LoRA instruction tuning to jointly use recent and retrieved context while abstaining when evidence is lacking. By sharing a visual encoder between understanding and retrieval branches and aligning features with linear adapters, SPARE achieves state‑of‑the‑art accuracy on OVO‑Bench and StreamingBench, outperforming Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct by over 20 percentage points on OVO‑Bench and 14 on StreamingBench.

By Senbin Xu, Zijun Zhang, Xinhua Wu, Li He, Jubo Feng, Li Qiao, Zhen Gao, Yan Zhang, Jixiang Luo, Rongrong Ji
arXiv AI
Jun 12

ReFoCUS: Reinforcement-guided Frame Optimization for Contextual Understanding

arXiv:2506. 01274v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent progress in Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) has enabled effective vision-language reasoning, yet the ability to video understanding remains constrained by suboptimal frame selection strategies, albeit with the rapid development of video-specialized LMMs.

By Hosu Lee, Junho Kim, Hyunjun Kim, Yong Man Ro
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 6

Evidence-Driven Dynamic Visual Selector for Efficient Long Video Understanding

Recent advancements in MLLM-based long-form video understanding have mitigated inference-time computational cost and limited context lengths by selecting query-relevant frames. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on external proxy scorers and rigid heuristic rules, inevitably suffering from misalignment with the target MLLM's intrinsic evidence and failing to accommodate the non-uniform spatiotemporal information density.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

SVMemAgent: A Streaming Video Memory Agent for Query-Agnostic Online Frame Selection

SVMemAgent introduces a streaming video memory (SVMem) that continuously updates a compact representation of observed frames for online keyframe selection without prior knowledge of video length, query, or future frames. The agent decides at each timestep whether to replace an existing memory frame with a new one or discard it, trained via Group Relative Policy Optimization using task-driven rewards from question-answer pairs. Experiments demonstrate that SVMemAgent outperforms existing online baselines and rivals offline methods, and its learned policy tends to favor frames containing textual information, potentially aiding downstream VideoQA tasks.

By Dohwan Ko, Ji Soo Lee, Pierce Chuang, Debojeet Chatterjee, Ashish Shenoy, Yichao Lu, Seungwhan Moon, Xin Luna Dong, Vikas Bhardwaj, Hyunwoo J. Kim