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EvoVid: Temporal-Centric Self-Evolution for Video Large Language Models
2026-05-21 03:00:35Shiqi Huang, Ziyue Wang, Zhongrong Zuo, Han Qiu, Qi She, Bihan WenAbstract
Recent Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in video reasoning through reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing RL pipelines rely heavily on human-annotated tasks and solutions, making them costly to scale and fundamentally constrained by human expertise. Self-evolving frameworks have recently emerged as a promising alternative through autonomous Questioner-Solver self-play. Unfortunately, these approaches are primarily designed for static modalities such as text and images, fundamentally failing to capture the temporal dynamics that are central to video reasoning. In this work, we propose $\textbf{EvoVid}$, a temporal-centric self-evolving framework that enables Video-LLMs to improve directly from raw, unannotated videos. Specifically, we introduce two complementary temporal-centric rewards: a temporal-aware Questioner reward that encourages temporally dependent question generation through temporal perturbation sensitivity, and a temporal-grounded Solver reward that provides automatic temporal supervision via inherent video segment localization. Extensive experiments across four base models and six benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over both base models and existing self-evolving baselines, achieving competitive performance with supervised methods. These results highlight temporal-centric self-evolution as an effective and scalable paradigm for video understanding and reasoning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21931
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Seizure-Semiology-Suite : A Clinically Multimodal Dataset, Benchmark, and Models for Seizure Semiology Understanding
2026-05-21 00:57:39Lina Zhang, Tonmoy Monsoor, Peizheng Li, Jiarui Cui, Xinyi Peng, Chong Han, Prateik Sinha, Siyuan Dai, Jessica Nichole Pasqua, Colin M McCrimmon, Weiting Liu, Hailey Marie Miranda, Bing Hu, Xiangting Wu, Tengyou Xu, Chunhan Li, Jiaye Tian, Jiarui Tang, Detao Ma, Lingye Kong, Junnan Lyu, Jungang Li, Yan Zan, Junhua Huang, Rajarshi Mazumder, Vwani RoychowdhuryAbstract
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in general video understanding, their capacity to interpret involuntary, and spatio-temporally evolving pathologic motor behaviors such as seizure semiology remains largely untested. To address this gap, we introduce Seizure-Semiology-Suite, a clinically grounded dataset and benchmark for fine-grained, structured seizure semiology understanding. The dataset includes 438 seizure videos annotated with over 35,000 dense labels covering 20 ILAE-defined semiological features. Building on this dataset, we propose a seven-task hierarchical benchmark that systematically evaluates MLLMs from low-level visual perception to temporal sequencing, narrative report generation, and seizure diagnosis. To enable clinically meaningful evaluation of generated reports, we further introduce the Report Quality Index for Seizure Semiology (Seizure-RQI). Extensive baselines across 11 open-weight MLLMs reveal systematic weaknesses in laterality reasoning, temporal localization, symptom sequencing, and clinically faithful reporting. We show that seizure-specific fine-tuning substantially improves performance across tasks, and that a two-stage neuro-symbolic framework achieves an F1 score of 0.96 on epileptic versus non-epileptic seizure classification. Seizure-Semiology-Suite establishes a rigorous benchmark for evaluating multimodal models in safety-critical medical video understanding and guides the development of clinically reliable, domain-adaptive multimodal intelligence.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21852
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Flat-Pack Bench: Evaluating Spatio-Temporal Understanding in Large Vision-Language Models through Furniture Assembly
2026-05-20 18:36:57Aditya Chetan, Eric Cai, Peeyush Kushwaha, Bharath Raj Nagoor Kani, Utkarsh Mall, Qianqian Wang, Noah Snavely, Bharath HariharanAbstract
The emergence of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has significantly advanced video understanding capabilities. However, existing benchmarks focus predominantly on coarse-grained tasks such as action segmentation, classification, captioning, and retrieval. Furthermore, these benchmarks often rely on entities that can be easily identified verbally, like household objects, animals, human subjects, etc., limiting their applicability to complex, in-the-wild video scenarios. But, many applications such as furniture assembly, cooking, etc., require step-by-step fine-grained spatio-temporal understanding of the video, which is not sufficiently evaluated in current benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce Flat-Pack Bench, a novel benchmark centered on furniture assembly tasks. Our benchmark evaluates LVLMs on nuanced tasks, including temporal ordering of assembly actions, temporal localization of assembly state, understanding part mating, and tracking, using multiple-choice questions paired with visual prompts highlighting relevant parts as references for fine-grained questions. Our experiments reveal that state-of-the-art LVLMs struggle significantly with fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning, highlighting their limitations in effectively leveraging temporal information from videos, limited tracking ability, and understanding of spatial interactions like physical contact.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21625
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RoadTones: Tone Controllable Text Generation from Road Event Videos
2026-05-20 17:08:18Chirag Parikh, Siddhi Pravin Lipare, Ravi Kiran SarvadevabhatlaAbstract
Existing video-language models can generate factual descriptions of road events but lack control over how these events are expressed: their tone, urgency, or style. This limits deployment in communication-critical settings where the effectiveness of a message depends on both content and presentation, not just factual accuracy. To mitigate this, we introduce a comprehensive dataset-model-evaluation suite for tone-controllable road video captioning. Our human-validated data generation pipeline expands road-video corpora with diverse tonal annotations and multi-tone captions, yielding the RoadTones-51K dataset. We propose RoadTones-VL-CoT, a controllable video-to-text model that also generates tone-conditioned Chain-of-Thought intermediate drafts for interpretability. We also introduce RoadTones-Eval, a new evaluation suite that jointly measures factual consistency and tone adherence. In addition, we conducted a user study whose results validate caption quality, tone control, and factual consistency. Together, these contributions lay the foundation for context-sensitive tone-controllable video captioning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21411
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USV: Towards Understanding the User-generated Short-form Videos
2026-05-20 07:27:36Haoyue Cheng, Su Xu, Liwei Jin, Wayne Wu, Chen Qian, Limin WangAbstract
Several large-scale video datasets have been published these years and have advanced the area of video understanding. However, the newly emerged user-generated short-form videos have rarely been studied. This paper presents USV, the User-generated Short-form Video dataset for high-level semantic video understanding. The dataset contains around 224K videos collected from UGC platforms by label queries without extra manual verification and trimming. Although video understanding has achieved plausible improvement these years, most works focus on instance-level recognition, which is not sufficient for learning the representation of the high-level semantic information of videos. Therefore, we further establish two tasks: topic recognition and video-text retrieval on USV. We propose two unified and effective baseline methods Multi-Modality Fusion Network (MMF-Net) and Video-Text Contrastive Learning (VTCL), to tackle the topic recognition task and video-text retrieval respectively, and carry out comprehensive benchmarks to facilitate future research. Our project page is this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20838
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ParaVT: Taming the Tool Prior Paradox for Parallel Tool Use in Agentic Video Reinforcement Learning
2026-05-19 18:01:26Zuhao Yang, Kaichen Zhang, Sudong Wang, Keming Wu, Zhongyu Yang, Bo Li, Xiaojuan Qi, Shijian Lu, Xingxuan Li, Lidong BingAbstract
Training large multimodal models (LMMs) via reinforcement learning (RL) to natively invoke video-processing tools (e.g., cropping) has become a promising route to long-video understanding. However, existing native-RL methods dispatch tool calls sequentially (i.e., one per turn): a single wrong crop propagates errors without peer correction, multi-turn tool calls corrupt context, and inference cost scales linearly with the number of turns. We introduce ParaVT, the first multi-agent end-to-end RL-trained framework for Parallel Video Tool calling, dispatching multiple time-window crops in a single turn for cleaner context and better fault tolerance. Yet applying standard RL to ParaVT reveals an obstacle we term the Tool Prior Paradox: the pretrained tool priors that enable tool exploration also destabilize cold-started structural format and expose the skip-tool reward shortcut under temperature sampling. A cross-model contrast on a weaker-prior LMM supports this claim: format stays stable but RL elicits zero tool calls, indicating that prior strength is the shared driver of both format collapse and tool exploration. We propose PARA-GRPO (Parseability-Anchored and Ratio-gAted GRPO), which augments standard RL with two complementary mechanisms: (i) a targeted format reward applied only at the structural-token positions most prone to collapse, and (ii) a per-prompt frame-budget randomization that creates training prompts where calling the tool yields a measurable reward signal over skipping it. Across six long-video understanding benchmarks, ParaVT improves over the Qwen3-VL baseline by +7.9% on average, with PARA-GRPO lifting training-time format compliance from 0.13 to 0.64. As tool capabilities become increasingly internalized in modern LMMs, RL must cooperate with the resulting priors, and ParaVT offers a general recipe for agentic RL. Code, data, and model weights are publicly available.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20342
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FineBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Vision-Language Models for Fine-grained Human Activity Understanding
2026-05-19 13:40:26Gueter Josmy Faure, Min-Hung Chen, Jia-Fong Yeh, Hung-Ting Su, Winston H. HsuAbstract
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in general video understanding, yet they often struggle with the fine-grained comprehension crucial for real-world applications requiring nuanced interpretation of human actions and interactions. While some recent human-centric benchmarks evaluate aspects of model behaviour such as fairness/ethics, emotion perception, and broader human-centric metrics, they do not combine long-form videos, very dense QA coverage, and frame-level spatial/temporal grounding at scale. To bridge this gap, we introduce FineBench, a human-centric video question answering (VQA) benchmark specifically designed to assess fine-grained understanding. FineBench comprises 199,420 multiple-choice QA pairs densely annotated across 64 long-form videos (15 minutes each), focusing on detailed person movement, person interaction, and object manipulation, including compositional actions. Our extensive evaluation reveals that while proprietary models like GPT-5 achieve respectable performance, current open-source VLMs significantly underperform, struggling particularly with spatial reasoning in multi-person scenes and distinguishing subtle differences in human movements and interactions. To address these identified weaknesses, we propose FineAgent, a modular framework that enhances VLMs by leveraging a Localizer and a Descriptor. Experiments show that FineAgent consistently improves the performance of various open VLMs on FineBench. FineBench provides a rigorous testbed for future research into fine-grained human-centric video understanding, while FineAgent offers a practical approach to enhance such reasoning in current VLMs.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19846
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EgoCoT-Bench: Benchmarking Grounded and Verifiable Operation-Centric Chain of Thought Reasoning for MLLMs
2026-05-19 09:02:20Yang Dai, Dian Jiao, Tianwei Lin, Wenqiao ZhangAbstract
The rapid development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has led to growing interest in egocentric video understanding, specifically the ability for MLLMs to recognize fine-grained hand-object interactions, track object state changes over time, and reason about manipulative processes in dynamic environments from a first-person perspective. However, existing egocentric video benchmarks suffer from \textbf{limited grounded rationale evaluation}, offering limited support for fine-grained operation-centric reasoning and rarely examining whether model rationales are grounded in explicit spatio-temporal evidence. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{EgoCoT-Bench}, a fine-grained egocentric benchmark for grounded and verifiable operation-centric reasoning with explicit step-by-step rationale annotations. Overall, EgoCoT-Bench comprises 3,172 verifiable QA pairs over 351 egocentric videos separated into four task groups for a total of 12 sub-task groups, encompassing perception and retrospection, anticipation, and high-level reasoning. The benchmark is constructed through a spatio-temporal scene graphs (STSG) guided generation framework and is further refined by human annotators to ensure correctness, egocentric relevance and fine-grained quality. Experimental results show continuing difficulties with egocentric fine-grained reasoning and further reveal that many multimodal models produce explanations that are answer-correct, but have evidence that is inconsistent with the answer. We hope EgoCoT-Bench can serve as a useful testbed for grounded and verifiable reasoning in egocentric video understanding. Project page and supplementary materials are available at: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19559
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LMM-Track4D: Eliciting 4D Dynamic Reasoning in LMMs via Trajectory-Grounded Dialogue
2026-05-19 05:35:13Chaoyue Li, Yongxue Xu, Jie Feng, Jiayu DingAbstract
Recent large multimodal models (LMMs) have become increasingly capable on image and video understanding, yet still struggle to sustain 4D continuous spatiotemporal dynamic reasoning. To study this capability gap, we formulate trajectory-grounded multi-turn spatiotemporal dialogue, a new task in which a model must answer spatiotemporal queries while returning structured 3D target trajectories over an entire short clip or a specified segment of a longer clip, and introduce Track4D-Bench, a benchmark with 526 clip-level dialogue samples spanning 23.5k frames and 7.5k object annotations, for training and evaluation. Building on this task, we propose LMM-Track4D, which combines RTGE (Ray--Time Geometry Encoding), a dedicated streaming state token TRK for long-horizon dynamic propagation, and an Object-Slot Kinematic, Residual-Anchor (OSK-RA) decoder for stable 4-step 3D state estimation under occlusion and viewpoint variation. Experiments on Track4D-Bench show consistent improvements over strong baselines, suggesting that explicit dynamic state modeling is a useful design principle for eliciting 4D dynamic reasoning in LMMs. Our code and dataset will be publicly available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19390
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DynaTok: Temporally Adaptive and Positional Bias-Aware Token Compression for Video-LLMs
2026-05-19 04:02:01Minyoung Park, Taehun Kong, Sangjun AhnAbstract
Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have greatly expanded multimodal reasoning capabilities. However, the massive number of visual tokens extracted from long video sequences incurs prohibitive computational costs, limiting their deployment in real-world scenarios. Existing training-free token compression methods select tokens based on attention magnitude as a proxy for semantic importance, but often overlook positional bias and rely only on short-term temporal locality, leading to redundant spatio-temporal coverage and inefficient token usage. We present DynaTok, a training-free, temporally adaptive and bias-aware token compression framework that allocates token budgets across both temporal and spatial dimensions. Through a lightweight exponential moving average (EMA) memory, the Temporal Budget Allocation (TBA) module dynamically assigns fewer tokens to redundant frames and more to novel frames, capturing long-term temporal variation. The Spatial Budget Allocation (SBA) module complements this by selecting spatially diverse and semantically important features using activation-based attention maps, while leveraging a spatial memory to reduce redundancy from previously selected regions and mitigate positional bias. DynaTok integrates seamlessly with existing Video-LLMs such as LLaVA-OneVision and LLaVA-Video without retraining, and effectively preserves semantic coverage under aggressive compression. Experiments on four representative VideoQA benchmarks-MVBench, LongVideoBench, MLVU, and VideoMME-show that DynaTok retains over 95% of baseline accuracy even with a 90% token reduction, surpassing recent training-free approaches. These results demonstrate that DynaTok provides a principled foundation for efficient and robust video reasoning, paving the way toward real-time streaming video understanding with future Video-LLMs.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19322
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HAVEN: Hierarchically Aligned Multimodal Benchmark for Unified Video Understanding
2026-05-19 00:48:14Mengqi Shi, Haopeng ZhangAbstract
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit strong performance on standard video tasks, their ability to faithfully summarize and reason over complex narratives remains poorly evaluated. Existing summarization benchmarks fragment supervision across isolated granularities, such as keyframes, key shots, or disjointed text summaries, failing to capture the inherently hierarchical structure of cross-modal alignment. To address this critical gap, we introduce HAVEN, a hierarchically aligned multimodal benchmark for unified video understanding. HAVEN pioneers a fully granular (frame, shot, and video levels) and fully multimodal (video and text) dataset architecture, complete with explicit, continuous alignment between modalities. Built upon this unified annotation paradigm, we propose a comprehensive evaluation suite spanning summarization, temporal reasoning, multimodal grounding, and saliency ranking. Extensive benchmarking of state-of-the-art MLLMs exposes a persistent gap between surface-level textual fluency and grounded multimodal understanding. Ultimately, HAVEN advances the evaluation of multimodal systems beyond traditional QA formats, offering a rigorous, standardized testbed to drive future research in interpretable, hierarchical video understanding. We publicly release the dataset, benchmark suite, and evaluation protocols.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19223
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Towards Data-Efficient Video Pre-training with Frozen Image Foundation Models
2026-05-18 21:35:09Svetlana Orlova, Niccol\`o Cavagnero, Gijs DubbelmanAbstract
Video foundation models achieve strong performance across many video understanding tasks, but typically require large-scale pre-training on massive video datasets, resulting in substantial data and compute costs. In contrast, modern image foundation models already provide powerful spatial representations. This raises an important question: can competitive video models be built by reusing these spatial representations and pre-training only for temporal reasoning? We take initial steps toward exploring a lightweight training paradigm that freezes a pre-trained image foundation model and trains only a recurrent temporal module to process streaming video. By reusing an image foundation model as a spatial encoder, this approach could significantly reduce the amount of video data and compute required compared to end-to-end video pre-training. In this work, we explore the feasibility of this approach before investing in computing for video pre-training. Our empirical findings across multiple video understanding tasks suggest that strong temporal performance can emerge without large-scale video pre-training, motivating future work on recurrent video foundation models obtained by pre-training a temporal module on top of a frozen image foundation model. Code: this https URL .
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19137
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OmniPro: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Omni-Proactive Streaming Video Understanding
2026-05-18 15:55:22Ruixiang Zhao, Jie Yang, Zijie Xin, Tianyi Wang, Fengyun Rao, Jing LYU, Xirong LiAbstract
Omni-proactive streaming video understanding, i.e., autonomously deciding when to speak and what to say from continuous audio-visual streams, is an emerging capability of omni-modal large language models. Existing benchmarks fall short in three key aspects: they rely primarily on visual signals, adopt polling or fixed-timestamp protocols instead of true proactive evaluation, and cover only a limited range of tasks, preventing reliable assessment and differentiation of omni-proactive streaming models. We present OmniPro, the first benchmark to jointly evaluate omni-modal perception, proactive responding, and diverse video understanding tasks. It comprises 2,700 human-verified samples spanning 9 sub-tasks and 3 cognitive levels, covering 6 basic video understanding capabilities. Notably, 84% of samples require audio signals (speech or non-speech), and each sample is annotated with modality-isolation labels to enable fine-grained multimodal analysis. We further introduce a dual-mode evaluation protocol: Probe mode assesses content understanding by querying the model before and after each ground-truth trigger, while Online mode evaluates full proactive ability by requiring models to autonomously decide when to respond in streaming input. Evaluating 11 representative models reveals three key findings: (1) audio provides consistent gains but with highly variable utilization across models, (2) performance degrades significantly over time, indicating limited long-horizon robustness, and (3) non-speech audio perception remains the weakest dimension.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18577
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Seeing Together:Multi-Robot Cooperative Egocentric Spatial Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models
2026-05-18 14:04:26Kunyu Peng, Zhikun Zhou, Kailun Yang, Di Wen, Ruiping Liu, Yufan Chen, Junwei Zheng, Hao Shi, Yi Zhou, M. Saquib Sarfraz, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van GoolAbstract
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made substantial progress in egocentric video understanding, but their ability to reason cooperatively from multiple embodied viewpoints remains largely unexplored. We study this problem through multi-robot cooperative dynamic spatial reasoning, where a model must answer spatial, temporal, visibility, and coordination questions by integrating synchronized egocentric videos from a team of moving robots. To support this setting, we introduce CoopSR, the first benchmark for this task, together with EgoTeam, a multi-robot egocentric QA dataset. EgoTeam contains 114,227 QA pairs spanning 19 question types, four difficulty tiers, and three team sizes in Habitat and iGibson, along with a real-world test set of around 2,326 QAs collected using two quadruped robots. We further propose SP-CoR (Spectral and Physics-Informed Cooperative Reasoner), an MLLM framework for fine-grained cooperative spatial reasoning. SP-CoR combines dynamics-aware multi-robot frame sampling, spectral- and physics-guided view fusion, and physics-aligned prompt distillation, enabling the model to benefit from privileged robot-pose supervision during training while requiring only egocentric videos at test time. Across 22 MLLM baselines, SP-CoR consistently improves cooperative reasoning, outperforming the strongest fine-tuned baseline by +3.87% on Habitat and +7.12% on iGibson. It also shows stronger generalization to unseen team sizes and real-world robot tests. Code can be found at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18431
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SPATIOROUTE: Dynamic Prompt Routing for Zero-Shot Spatial Reasoning
2026-05-18 10:54:55Pawat Chunhachatrachai, Gueter Josmy Faure, Hung-Ting Su, Winston H. HsuAbstract
Spatial question answering over egocentric video is a challenging task that requires Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to reason about 3D object positions, scene affordances, and directional relationships, particularly in the zero-shot setting where no task-specific fine-tuning is available. We introduce SpatioRoute, a dynamic prompt generation approach that routes each incoming question to a semantically tailored prompt template -- without any additional training, fine-tuning, or 3D sensor input. SpatioRoute operates in two complementary modes: SpatioRoute-R, a rule-based router that deterministically maps question typologies (e.g., What, Is, How, Can, Which) to specialized prompt templates; and SpatioRoute-L, an LLM-driven approach that generates task-specific prompts from the question and situational context alone, with no video input at routing time. We evaluate SpatioRoute on the SQA3D benchmark across VLMs spanning model families. SpatioRoute achieves consistent overall accuracy gains up to 5% over fixed prompt baselines, establishing a new state-of-the-art for zero-shot video-only spatial VQA without requiring 3D point-cloud inputs. As an additional finding, we observe that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, implemented via the Think it Twice architecture, consistently degrades performance in this setting on Qwen series models, confirming that question-aware routing is more effective than uniform reasoning instructions for spatial video understanding.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18209
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OmniSelect: Dynamic Modality-Aware Token Compression for Efficient Omni-modal Large Language Models
2026-05-18 08:33:52Morunliu Yang, Ruotao Xu, Le Li, Yue Wang, Jianxin Zhang, Juntao Li, Yihang Lou, Siwei Feng, Peifeng LiAbstract
Omnimodal large language models (OmniLLMs) have recently gained increasing attention for unified audio-video understanding. However, processing long multimodal token sequences introduces substantial computational overhead, making efficient token compression crucial. Existing methods typically rely on fixed, modality-specific guidance, which fails to account for the varying importance of modalities across different queries. To address this limitation, we propose $\textbf{OmniSelect}$, a training-free, modality-adaptive token pruning framework that dynamically selects appropriate compression strategies for multimodal inputs. Specifically, we leverage a lightweight AudioCLIP model to estimate cross-modal relevance and categorize each input into three pruning regimes: Audio-Centric, Video-Centric, and Uniform pruning. Based on these relevance scores, OmniSelect further performs fine-grained token pruning within each temporal group, adaptively allocating pruning ratios to preserve informative tokens across modalities. By explicitly modeling modality preference and enabling dynamic strategy selection, OmniSelect effectively avoids the pitfalls of one-size-fits-all compression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves efficient multimodal token reduction while maintaining strong performance, without requiring any additional training.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18041
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An Efficient Streaming Video Understanding Framework with Agentic Control
2026-05-18 06:29:44Jinming Liu, Jianguo Huang, Zhaoyang Jia, Jiahao Li, Xiaoyi Zhang, Zongyu Guo, Bin Li, Wenjun Zeng, Yan Lu, Xin JinAbstract
Streaming video requires handling dynamic information density under strict latency budgets. Yet, existing methods typically employ static strategies, such as fixed memory compression or reliance on a single model, forcing a trade-off: fast models fail on complex queries, while always-on heavy models violate real-time constraints and overcomplicate simple queries. Rather than fixing these decisions upfront, we propose R3-Streaming (Remember, Respond, Reason), which formulates streaming video understanding as a cascaded control problem: for each query, the system compresses memory, judges response readiness, and routes computation sequentially, so that each downstream decision builds on progressively refined information states. To optimize this pipeline, we introduce an age-aware forgetting policy for memory compression, as aggressively compressing historical frames can yield substantial performance gains. For compute routing, we propose TB-GRPO, a target-balanced reinforcement learning objective that routes hard queries to a stronger model while preventing mode collapse. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that R3-Streaming achieves state-of-the-art results among streaming MLLMs, reaching 57.92 on OVO-Bench and 76.36 on StreamingBench, while reducing visual token usage by 95 to 96 percent.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17921
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LiteFrame: Efficient Vision Encoders Unlock Frame Scaling in Video LLMs
2026-05-17 05:02:52Jihwan Kim, Nikhil Parthasarathy, Danfeng Qin, Junhwa Hur, Deqing Sun, Bohyung Han, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Boqing GongAbstract
The fundamental challenge in scaling Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) to long-form video lies in managing the explosion of visual-token context length. Existing strategies predominantly focus on "post-hoc" token reduction -- reducing visual tokens after feature extraction to alleviate the LLM's computational overhead. While these methods effectively reduce the number of visual tokens, we observe that the primary latency bottleneck then shifts from the LLM to the expensive per-frame processing of the vision encoder. To address this, we introduce LiteFrame, a strong, yet highly efficient video encoder backbone for Video LLMs. To train LiteFrame, we propose Compressed Token Distillation (CTD), a novel training framework that teaches a compact student vision encoder to directly predict information-dense, spatio-temporally compressed representations produced by a large teacher vision model, effectively bypassing redundant computation. When coupled with further Language Model Adaptation (LMA), this approach results in a new latency-accuracy Pareto frontier -- compared with InternVL3-8B, LiteFrame provides a 35% reduction in end-to-end latency while processing 8$\times$ more frames and improves average video understanding accuracy across multiple benchmarks. Our results demonstrate a new potential path to unlocking longer-form video understanding under fixed compute budgets.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17260
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Visual Agentic Memory: Enabling Online Long Video Understanding via Online Indexing, Hierarchical Memory, and Agentic Retrieval
2026-05-15 17:44:53Aiden Yiliu Li, Nels Numan, Anthony SteedAbstract
Long video understanding requires more than large context windows. It also needs a memory mechanism that decides what visual evidence to retain, keeps it searchable over long horizons, and grounds later reasoning in recoverable observations rather than compressed latent state alone. We propose Visual Agentic Memory (VAM), a training-free framework with three components. Online Indexing supports selective evidence retention under streaming constraints. Hierarchical Memory organises retained evidence in a Parallel Representation that aligns temporal context with spatial observations. Agentic Retrieval searches, inspects, and verifies candidate evidence before producing a grounded answer. On OVO-Bench, VAM achieves the highest RT+BT average (68.41) across all reported baselines, improving over end-to-end use of the same underlying MLLM (Gemini 3 Flash, 67.46). On the month-scale split of MM-Lifelong train@month (105.6 hours over 51 days), VAM reaches 17.11%, second only to ReMA with GPT-5 (17.62%). These results suggest that long-horizon video understanding benefits from treating visual memory as an explicit, inspectable, and queryable substrate. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16481
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VideoSeeker: Incentivizing Instance-level Video Understanding via Native Agentic Tool Invocation
2026-05-15 15:43:28Yiming Zhao, Yu Zeng, Wenxuan Huang, Zhen Fang, Qing Miao, Qisheng Su, Jiawei Zhao, Jiayin Cai, Lin Chen, Zehui Chen, Yukun Qi, Yao Hu, Xiaolong Jiang, Feng ZhaoAbstract
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown significant progress in video understanding, yet they face substantial challenges in tasks requiring precise spatiotemporal localization at the instance level. Existing methods primarily rely on text prompts for human-model interaction, but these prompts struggle to provide precise spatial and temporal references, resulting in poor user experience. Furthermore, current approaches typically decouple visual perception from language reasoning, centering reasoning around language rather than visual content, which limits the model's ability to proactively perceive fine-grained visual evidence. To address these challenges, we propose VideoSeeker, a novel paradigm for instance-level video understanding through visual prompts. VideoSeeker seamlessly integrates agentic reasoning with instance-level video understanding tasks, enabling the model to proactively perceive and retrieve relevant video segments on demand. We construct a four-stage fully automated data synthesis pipeline to efficiently generate large-scale, high-quality instance-level video data. We internalize tool-calling and proactive perception capabilities into the model via cold-start supervision and RL training, building a powerful video understanding model. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves an average improvement of +13.7% over baselines on instance-level video understanding tasks, surpassing powerful closed-source models such as GPT-4o and Gemini-2.5-Pro, while also showing effective transferability on general video understanding benchmarks. The relevant datasets and code will be released publicly.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16079
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