arXiv AI

Continual Visual and Verbal Learning Through a Child's Egocentric Input

arXiv:2606. 05115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Children learn the meanings of words from a continuous, temporally structured stream of egocentric experience.

arXiv AI
Oct 9

Mid-Training Language Models on Raw Video

The paper investigates using raw, unlabeled video as a mid‑training phase for a pretrained language model. By encoding video frames into visual tokens and training the model to predict the next token, the authors mid‑train Qwen3‑1.7B on YT‑Temporal‑1B clips. The resulting model outperforms a non‑mid‑trained counterpart by 2.9 points on video benchmarks and 5.1 points on image benchmarks, while maintaining comparable text performance.

By Jaedong Hwang, Xiaoqian Shen, Ernie Chang, Changsheng Zhao, Chong Zhou, Saksham Suri, Qi Qian, Zechun Liu, Lemeng Wu, Qinsi Wang, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Wei Wen
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

VIVAS: Vitalizing Visual Perception in VLM Pre-training via Vision-language Unified Autoregressive Supervision

VIVAS is a new Vision‑Language Model pre‑training framework that addresses the lack of fine‑grained visual perception in existing VLMs. It introduces a unified token space and a dense‑structural‑semantic vision tokenizer that expands the textual vocabulary with visual tokens, enabling vision‑language unified autoregressive supervision over both visual details and linguistic content. Trained on 12.4 T tokens, VIVAS achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on 7 tasks and 39 multimodal benchmarks.

By Zhehan Kan, Yubo Zhu, Xinghua Jiang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 2

OneStreamer: Unifying Perception, Memory, and Proactive Response in Streaming Video Interaction

OneStreamer is a streaming video model that jointly learns to record evidence and respond to tasks through a shared proactive generation process. Its Proactive Hierarchical Caption Memory creates time‑grounded local‑detail captions and event summaries, while Proactive State Transition Learning reduces waiting states by supervising all output anchors. The authors also built a large OneStreamer‑1M dataset and show that a 4B model outperforms baselines on eight streaming video benchmarks, with ablations confirming the benefits of generated captions and PSTL.

By Xiangyu Zeng, Yuandong Yang, Zhiqiu Zhang, Yuhan Zhu, Xinhao Li, Qingyi Si, Dingyu Yao, Changlian Ma, Haoran Chen, Xinyu Chen, Yansong Shi, Junhao Zhou, Yifei Li, Jun Zhang, Chuanyu Qin, Chenxu Yang, Xinlei Yu, Kun Ouyang, Yuchen Shao, Qianshan Wei, Changhai Zhou, Jun Gao, Jiaqi Wang, Limin Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

DynaTokens: Controlling Token Dynamics for Continual Video-Language Understanding

The paper introduces DynaTokens, a transformer-based token generator that produces fine‑tuning tokens on demand for continual VideoQA with multimodal large language models. It uses shared generation weights and meta‑learning‑inspired regularisers to reduce task interference and forgetting, connecting the objective to sharpness‑aware optimisation for flatter cross‑task minima. Experiments on standard continual VideoQA benchmarks show that DynaTokens achieves higher average accuracy, lower forgetting, better zero‑shot generalisation, and robust cross‑modal transfer in a new ImageQA→VideoQA protocol.

By Toan Nguyen, Yang Liu, Celso De Melo, Flora D. Salim
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

The Shape of Time: Video-Token Contrast for Temporal Understanding in VideoLMs

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 AI
Aug 20

EgoMemReason: A Memory-Driven Reasoning Benchmark for Long-Horizon Egocentric Video Understanding

EgoMemReason is a new benchmark for week‑long egocentric video understanding that focuses on memory‑driven reasoning rather than simple perception tasks. It tests three memory types—entity, event, and behavior—across 500 questions, each requiring evidence from an average of 5.1 video segments and 25.9 hours of backtracking. Evaluation of 17 models shows that even the best achieves only 39.6% accuracy, highlighting the difficulty of long‑horizon memory in multimodal systems.

By Ziyang Wang, Yue Zhang, Shoubin Yu, Ce Zhang, Zengqi Zhao, Jaehong Yoon, Hyunji Lee, Gedas Bertasius, Mohit Bansal
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Training-Free Temporal Abstraction for General Video Understanding

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 AI
Oct 2

Before It Fades: Reinforcing Temporal Representations at Inference Time in VideoLLMs

The paper introduces Temporal Activation Injection (TAI), a post‑processing technique that reinforces temporal representations in Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) at inference time. By measuring the temporal divergence vector τ_l— the layer‑wise difference caused by reversing video frame order— the authors find that temporal information peaks at intermediate layers and fades toward the output. TAI injects the peak divergence back into later layers, improving temporal reasoning on three VideoLLMs across four benchmarks without affecting non‑temporal performance.

By Youngwoo Shin, Yusung Ro, Minseo Kim, Junmo Kim