arXiv Computation and Language

Long Story Short: Story-level Video Understanding from 20K Short Films

The paper introduces Short‑Films 20K (SF20K), a large publicly available movie dataset comprising 20,143 amateur films totaling 3,582 hours, with an average length of 12 minutes per film. Accompanying the dataset is SF20K‑Test, a manual open‑ended question‑answering benchmark featuring 95 movies and 979 question‑answer pairs. Analysis of the benchmark shows limited data leakage, highlights the necessity of long‑term reasoning, and demonstrates that instruction tuning on the large‑scale dataset significantly boosts vision‑language model performance.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Where to Look Matters: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Long-Video Understanding

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
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Watch, Remember, Reason: Human-View Video Understanding with MLLMs

arXiv:2606. 07433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video understanding is being rapidly transformed by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as research moves from short clips to long, multimodal, and knowledge-intensive video scenarios.

By Jiahao Meng, Yue Tan, Qi Xu, Kuan Gao, Weisong Liu, Yanwei Li, Jason Li, Lingdong Kong, Haochen Wang, Qianyu Zhou, Jiangning Zhang, Guangliang Cheng, Yunhai Tong, Lu Qi, Minghsuan Yang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Video-IFBench: Evaluating Instruction Following of Multimodal LLMs in Video Understanding Scenarios

Video-IFBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate how well multimodal large language models (MLLMs) follow user-specified instructions in video understanding tasks. It introduces an instruction taxonomy with four templates—single-task, multi-task, selection, and nested—covering 32 task types and 39 constraint categories that span semantic and format requirements. The benchmark was built using a semi-automatic pipeline that combines MLLMs, programmatic processing, and human verification, producing 1.5K samples, and a large-scale evaluation of over 20 recent MLLMs shows that instruction following remains difficult, especially for complex constraints and conditional structures.

By Hongbo Liu, Peixian Chen, Sihan Liu, Peiyuan Zhang, Kai Zou, Dian Zheng, Xiaoxing Hu, Yuhao Dong, Mengdan Zhang, Yunhang Shen, Haoyu Cao, Wei Liu, Weibo Gu, Xing Sun, Shengjie Zhao
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

MemoryCard: Topic-Aware Multi-Modal Clue Compression for Long-Video Question Answering

MemoryCard is a video-memory-based augmentation framework designed to improve long-video question answering for Vision‑Language Models. It segments lengthy videos into semantically coherent units—each representing a distinct topic or event—by performing a self‑reading process over the video and aligned utterances. For each unit, the framework generates an event‑level video gist and selects representative visual moments, which are compiled into unified Memory Cards that are used for retrieval and answering questions, yielding up to a 21.8% relative accuracy improvement under comparable visual‑token budgets.

By Qing Yang, Pengcheng Huang, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Gang Li, Maosong Sun