arXiv:2512. 05774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long video understanding (LVU) is challenging because answering real-world queries often depends on sparse, temporally dispersed cues buried in hours of mostly redundant and irrelevant content.
By Ziyang Wang, Honglu Zhou, Shijie Wang, Junnan Li, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, Mohit Bansal, Michael S. Ryoo, Juan Carlos Niebles
The paper surveys emerging video understanding agents that use video as the primary source and actively decide what information to inspect, retain, verify, and act upon. It formalizes an agent loop for video understanding and organizes the literature through a challenge‑to‑design taxonomy linking context bottlenecks, evidence sparsity, temporal causality, and multimodal ambiguity to corresponding design solutions. The survey also reviews state‑space paradigms, learning paradigms, supervision signals, benchmarks, evaluation protocols, and outlines open directions toward agentic‑native temporal modeling and video‑native agents.
By Xinyu Deng, Siwen Luo, Daochang Liu
arXiv:2609.15606v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on short video understanding yet remain limited on long videos due to the...
By Weixin Xu, Zhenyu Yang, Bing Wang, Shengsheng Qian, Changsheng Xu
The paper introduces LARVA, a framework that distills multi‑round video agents by jointly learning latent reasoning and visual observations. Instead of using textual captions, an observer sends compact continuous representations to a reasoner, which then selects the next action or produces an answer. The approach incorporates action and answer supervision through this interface and uses observation reconstruction and reasoning‑distribution alignment as auxiliary signals, achieving strong results on five video‑understanding benchmarks with 4B and 7B models.
By Junzhang Liu, Hao Yuan, Qi Zhang, Yiming Wu, Long Chen, Zhecan Wang
arXiv:2608.31005v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Existing long-video agents acquire evidence through one uniform behavior, ignoring whether the required evidence is concentrated, requires broad occurr...
By Can Zhang, Baofeng Zhang, Xiaotian Han, Junyuan Shang, Yuchen Ding, Shuohuan Wang, Dianhai Yu, Ruirui Li
arXiv:2606. 26904v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video reasoning language models implicitly assume that every input frame is equally reliable.
By Yangfan He, Yujin Choi, Jaehong Yoon
The paper introduces OWLET, an on-policy weighted learning method for post-training Video Large Language Models. OWLET leverages a richer teacher view that combines global temporal context with question-conditioned local windows to provide visual evidence, and it employs evidence-aware credit redistribution and spatiotemporal state alignment to better utilize this evidence during reinforcement learning. The approach aims to improve video reasoning by aligning token-level supervision with spatiotemporal representations.
By Qitan Lv, Ke Fan, Hong Wang, Wen Wu, Yilin Wang, Bowen Zhou, Feng Wu, Chao Zhang
arXiv:2609.38119v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long-form video understanding requires multimodal agents to iteratively gather evidence over many reasoning steps. However, most existing agentic metho...
By Jinfa Huang, Jianming Xu, Jingyang Lin, Zhengyuan Yang, Jiebo Luo
arXiv:2510. 17045v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Video reasoning using Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) relies on costly reinforcement learning (RL) and verbose chain-of-thought, resulting in substantial computational overhead during both training and inference.
By Deepak Sridhar, Kartikeya Bhardwaj, Jeya Pradha Jeyaraj, Nuno Vasconcelos, Ankita Nayak, Harris Teague
arXiv:2609.37950v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Video understanding agents acquire evidence through an executable harness that controls what they observe and how they use those observations. However,...
By Bingjun Luo, Jialin Guo, Siqi Li
VAMR is a video agent that handles multiple questions about a single long‑form video using a single shared tool‑use trajectory, rather than treating each question separately. It employs question‑conditioned visual perception, layered multi‑question memory, and a question‑horizon policy optimization to jointly acquire evidence and progressively build a shared understanding. In benchmark tests (LVBench, Video‑Holmes, LongVideoBench), VAMR outperforms prior methods, achieving higher accuracy and fewer reasoning rounds and processed frames.
By Runquan Gui, Hanzhu Chen, Zehao Wang, Hanxin Zhu, Xin Li, Zhibo Chen
arXiv:2606. 07512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Vision-Language Models struggle with hours-long videos because processing full-length visual sequences induces prohibitive token explosion and attention dilution.
By Cong Chen, Guo Gan, Kaixiang Ji, ChaoYang Zhang, Zhen Yang, Guangming Yao, Hao Chen, Jingdong Chen, Yi Yuan, Chunhua Shen