cs.CVMar 5, 2026

Towards Multimodal Lifelong Understanding: A Dataset and Agentic Baseline

Authors: Guo Chen, Lidong Lu, Yicheng Liu, Liangrui Dong, Lidong Zou, Jixin Lv, Zhenquan Li, Xinyi Mao, +12 more

Organizations: 1Nanjing University · 2NVIDIA · 3Zhejiang University · 4Shanghai Jiao Tong University · 5The University of Tokyo

Abstract

While datasets for video understanding have scaled to hour-long durations, they typically consist of densely concatenated clips that differ from natural, unscripted daily life. To bridge this gap, we introduce MM-Lifelong, a dataset designed for Multimodal Lifelong Understanding. Comprising 181.1 hours of footage, it is structured across Day, Week, and Month scales to capture varying temporal densities. Extensive evaluations reveal two critical failure modes in current paradigms: end-to-end MLLMs suffer from a Working Memory Bottleneck due to context saturation, while representative agentic baselines experience Global Localization Collapse when navigating sparse, month-long timelines. To address this, we propose the Recursive Multimodal Agent (ReMA), which employs dynamic memory management to iteratively update a recursive belief state, significantly outperforming existing methods. Finally, we establish dataset splits designed to isolate temporal and domain biases, providing a rigorous foundation for future research in supervised learning and out-of-distribution generalization.

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