Posted by Long Zhao, Senior Research Scientist, and Ting Liu, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google Research An astounding number of videos are available on the Web, covering a variety of content from everyday moments people share to historical moments to scientific observations, each of which contains a unique record of the world. The right tools could help researchers analyze these videos, transforming how we understand the world around us.
Posted by Nishant Jain, Pre-doctoral Researcher, and Pradeep Shenoy, Research Scientist, Google Research The constantly changing nature of the world around us poses a significant challenge for the development of AI models. Often, models are trained on longitudinal data with the hope that the training data used will accurately represent inputs the model may receive in the future.
Simon Willison created a video compressor tool that uses the WebAssembly build of FFMPEG to optimize a demo video of his Equal Earth animation recorded on his phone. He employed Claude Fable 5.1 in Claude Code for web to generate the tool, enabling him to publish the optimized video on his blog. The project showcases how modern web technologies can streamline video processing workflows.
Posted by Omar Benjelloun, Software Engineer, Google Research, and Peter Mattson, Software Engineer, Google Core ML and President, MLCommons Association Machine learning (ML) practitioners looking to reuse existing datasets to train an ML model often spend a lot of time understanding the data, making sense of its organization, or figuring out what subset to use as features. So much time, in fact, that progress in the field of ML is hampered by a fundamental obstacle: the wide variety of data representations.
arXiv:2609.12818v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long video understanding often behaves like a visual needle-in-a-haystack problem: query-relevant evidence is sparsely distributed across long temporal...
Posted by Yang Zhao, Senior Software Engineer, and Tingbo Hou, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Core ML Text-to-image diffusion models have shown exceptional capabilities in generating high-quality images from text prompts. However, leading models feature billions of parameters and are consequently expensive to run, requiring powerful desktops or servers (e.
Concord introduces a Video Relational Algebra (VRA) that models videos, transcripts, frames, and object tracks, enabling semantic video queries. It applies approximate optimizations to rewrite VRA queries, reducing large language model (MLLM) usage by processing transcripts or using detection and tracking instead of full-video MLLM joins. Experiments on soccer broadcasts and lectures show that Concord sends only a small fraction of video to the MLLM, cutting costs by up to 87%, and improves cross‑camera query accuracy from an F1 of .364 to .813 without any MLLM calls.
arXiv:2606. 28344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with retrieved web text has become a dominant paradigm, yet the web is not natively textual: existing systems depend on complex parsing pipelines that linearize HTML and discard layout, visual structure, and formatting.
The paper evaluates five training‑free, plug‑and‑play keyframe selection methods for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on long‑video understanding tasks. It compares these methods across three different MLLMs and three video question‑answering benchmarks, finding that QAaF performs best in 13 of 15 settings while FOCUS ranks second. The study offers a unified benchmark for assessing MLLM‑agnostic keyframe selection techniques.
arXiv:2609.10008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Composed video retrieval (CoVR) searches a gallery for the target video that realizes a natural-language modification of a source clip. However, at gal...
arXiv:2606. 01485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We describe our submission to the VRR Challenge @ CVPR 2026, built on the \emph{ImplicitQA} / \emph{VRR-QA} benchmark~\cite{implicitqa}: multiple-choice video question answering in which answers are deliberately \emph{not} observable in any single frame and must be inferred from spatial layout, motion, depth, viewpoint, causality, and social context across discontinuous frames of creative video.
arXiv:2509. 09151v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Research in video understanding has advanced rapidly, driven by increasingly diverse datasets and more powerful model architectures.
arXiv:2610.00960v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A video benchmark should reward the capability it claims to measure, yet models can exploit answer options, question text, or partial visual evidence....