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:2607. 24582v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-video understanding increasingly relies on large vision-language models and tool-augmented reasoning, but most systems apply the same inference procedure to every example regardless of difficulty.
By Jinlong Yang, Wenhao Zhang, Kuanwei Lin, Sijie Cheng
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.
By Sadegh Mohammadian
arXiv:2607. 02959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce VSeek, an agentic framework that transforms long-video question answering (LVQA) from a passive, single-pass perception task into a multi-turn retrieval process.
By Harsh Goel, S P Sharan, Sahil Shah, Minkyu Choi, Joungbin An, Kristen Grauman, Sandeep P. Chinchali
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.
By Etienne Casanova, Sevan Brodjian, Pietro Perona
arXiv:2607. 24794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate superior generalization in fundamental video tasks, restricted context windows limit their long video understanding.
By Linghao Meng, Qiankun Li, Junyuan Mao, Pujin Liao, Zhicheng He, Enbo Zhang, Kun Wang, Yang Liu, Huazhu Fu, Yueming Jin
arXiv:2608. 15869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly use visual chain-of-thought (Visual CoT) to reason about spatial, temporal, and embodied environments.
By Xiaoyu Zhu, Xinke Deng, Suresh Taddewadikar, Arnab Kumar Mondal, Zhongyu Jiang, Ian Fasel, Joerg Liebelt
arXiv:2607. 02927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video understanding is moving beyond closed-context perception toward open-world evidence exploration, a paradigm formalized as Video Deep Research (VDR).
By Zhenkun Gao, Yicheng Bao, Jinlong Peng, Xueheng Li, Theo Huang, Bangwei Liu, Kunquan Li, Zhenye Gan, Tao Hu, Chengjun Xie, Mingqian Yang, Xuanhua He, Zhizhong Zhang, Xin Tan, Chengjie Wang, Yuan Xie
arXiv:2608.20814v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Though Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive potential in video understanding, long video understanding (LVU) remains challeng...
By Beibei Zhang, Chao Xu, Jun Lan, Zongyi Li, Lai Wei, Huijia Zhu, Tongwei Ren
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
The paper introduces Clue-OPSD, a clue‑privileged on‑policy self‑distillation framework that improves long‑video understanding by focusing on short, question‑relevant clue intervals rather than the entire video. Experiments on multiple benchmarks and Qwen3.5 model scales show that this approach consistently outperforms standard backbone models and competes strongly with supervised post‑training baselines, all while requiring fewer input frames and no additional inference modules.
By Kaishen Wang, Dongdi Zhao, Yijun Liang, Dingqiang Ye, Ruibo Chen, Heng Huang, Di Fu
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.
By Baixuan Xu, Yinyui Xu, Tianshi Zheng, Zhaowei Wang, Weiqi Wang, Haochen Shi, Jiayu Liu, Qing Zong, Xiyu Ren, Xinyu Geng, Zhitao He, Yangqiu Song