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: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: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
AgentVidBench is a new multi‑hop video question‑answering benchmark designed to evaluate spatial, temporal, and causal reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Unlike existing tests that focus on simple scene queries or global summaries, AgentVidBench includes step‑by‑step solution traces to assess whether agents gather the necessary evidence to justify their answers. Experiments with 12 MLLMs show limited single‑turn performance, but integrating these models into agentic workflows improves both accuracy and trajectory scores, establishing AgentVidBench as a comprehensive testbed for future research on agentic video understanding.
By Seoyeon An, Hyeonseo Jang, Minsu Kim, Chanho Lee, Younghan Park, Kangwook Lee
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
Recent advancements in chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning have shown promise in enhancing video understanding and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing CoT-based MLLMs require labor-intensive CoT annotations and incur substantial training and inference overhead.