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
Video-OPSD introduces a post‑training framework for Video Large Language Models that leverages privileged visual evidence to enhance on‑policy self‑distillation. The method constructs a self‑teacher conditioned only on annotated evidence frames, while the student processes the full video, allowing the teacher to provide more focused supervision. Additionally, an evidence‑guided token optimization scheme weights distillation based on each token’s reliance on privileged evidence, improving perceptually grounded reasoning. Experiments demonstrate consistent gains over standard OPSD and comparable performance to GRPO with less training time.
By Ziyue Wang, Shiqi Huang, Weiwen Xu, Bihan Wen, Xudong Jiang
Vision-language models (VLMs) have made substantial progress in long-video understanding, with standard backbone models typically answering questions from frames sampled across the full video. However...
arXiv:2605. 06094v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training VideoLLMs for complex reasoning remains challenging due to sparse sequence level rewards and the lack of fine grained credit assignment over long, temporally grounded reasoning trajectories.
By Hao Lin, Kunyang Lv, Xu Jiang, Jingqi Tian, Zhongjing Du, Jiayu Ding, Qiaoman Zhang, Hongbo Jin
arXiv:2609.09300v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Video understanding demands a convergence of complementary capabilities across perception, temporal understanding, and complex reasoning, which are dif...
By Zhenxin Qin, Peng Shi, Cong Han, Yinlong Qian, Zequn Jie, Lin Ma
The paper introduces VT-Contrast, a representation-level temporal counterfactual objective designed to improve temporal understanding in Video Language Models (VideoLMs). By supervising late-layer last-frame video tokens and contrasting order-preserving views with reordered counterfactuals graded by Kendall tau distance, VT-Contrast addresses the mismatch between ordered video input and text-based supervision. The method requires no architectural changes, is compatible with various VideoLM training tasks, and demonstrates improved performance on temporal understanding benchmarks.
By Yumeng Shi, Quanyu Long, Yin Wu, Wenya Wang
arXiv:2608. 16316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for video reasoning have long been hindered by the high computational cost of processing vast amounts of visual information.
By Ao Shen, Yongheng Zhang, Yinghui Li, Manning Wang, Di Yin, Xing Sun
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: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:2505.01583v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Understanding causal event relationships and achieving fine-grained temporal grounding in videos remain challenging for vision-language models (VLM...
By Jen-Hao Cheng, Yi-Hao Peng, Huapeng Zhou, Vivian Wang, Huayu Wang, Hsiang-Wei Huang, Wenhao Chai, Hou-I Liu, Kuang-Ming Chen, Cheng-Yen Yang, Yi-Ling Chen, Vibhav Vineet, Qin Cai, Jenq-Neng Hwang
arXiv:2608. 03632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-Policy distillation (OPD) transfers teacher capabilities by supervising student-sampled trajectories with dense token-level teacher signals.
By Yinuo Jiang, Yongjie Ye, Zhou Tao, Xiang Zhuang, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen, Tiankai Li
VisionCoach is an input‑adaptive reinforcement learning framework that enhances spatio‑temporal grounding in video reasoning by using visual prompting during training. The system selectively applies visual prompts to challenging inputs, amplifying question‑relevant evidence and suppressing distractors, and then internalizes these improvements through self‑distillation so that inference can be performed on raw videos without prompts. Experiments on multiple benchmarks (V‑STAR, VideoMME, World‑Sense, VideoMMMU, PerceptionTest, and Charades‑STA) show that VisionCoach achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance while maintaining a single efficient inference pathway.
By Daeun Lee, Shoubin Yu, Yue Zhang, Mohit Bansal