ABMAMBA: Multimodal Large Language Model with Aligned Hierarchical Bidirectional Scan for Efficient Video Captioning

Advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are transforming video captioning from a descriptive endpoint into a semantic interface for both video understanding and generation. However, the dominant paradigm still casts videos as monolithic narrative paragraphs that entangle visual, auditory, and identity information. This dense coupling not only compromises representational fidelity but also limits scalability, since even local edits can trigger global rewrites. To address this structural bottleneck, we propose Multi-Stream Scene Script (MTSS), a novel paradigm that replaces monolithic text with factorized and explicitly grounded scene descriptions. MTSS is built on two core principles: Stream Factorization, which decouples a video into complementary streams (Reference, Shot, Event, and Global), and Relational Grounding, which reconnects these isolated streams through explicit identity and temporal links to maintain holistic video consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MTSS consistently enhances video understanding across various models, achieving an average reduction of 25% in the total error rate on Video-SALMONN-2 and an average performance gain of 67% on the Daily-Omni reasoning benchmark. It also narrows the performance gap between smaller and larger MLLMs, indicating a substantially more learnable caption interface. Finally, even without architectural adaptation, replacing monolithic prompts with MTSS in multi-shot video generation yields substantial human-rated improvements: a 45% boost in cross-shot identity consistency, a 56% boost in audio-visual alignment, and a 71% boost in temporal controllability.

While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, long-form video understanding remains a significant challenge. In this study, we focus on video understanding by MLLMs. This task is challenging because processing a full stream of RGB frames is computationally intractable and highly redundant, as self-attention have quadratic complexity with sequence length. In this paper, we propose ReMoRa, a video MLLM that processes videos by operating directly on their compressed representations. A sparse set of RGB keyframes is retained for appearance, while temporal dynamics are encoded as a motion representation, removing the need for sequential RGB frames. These motion representations act as a compact proxy for optical flow, capturing temporal dynamics without full frame decoding. To refine the noise and low fidelity of block-based motions, we introduce a module to denoise and generate a fine-grained motion representation. Furthermore, our model compresses these features in a way that scales linearly with sequence length. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ReMoRa through extensive experiments across a comprehensive suite of long-video understanding benchmarks. ReMoRa outperformed baseline methods on multiple challenging benchmarks, including LongVideoBench, NExT-QA, and MLVU.

Scaling Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to long-form video understanding is bottlenecked by the explosion of visual tokens, which saturates context windows and incurs prohibitive costs. Current solutions predominantly rely on auxiliary models for token reduction but face a fundamental dilemma: lightweight encoder-driven approaches often overlook critical semantic information, whereas heavyweight MLLM-driven reduction negates the efficiency gains. {In this work, we identify a more fundamental inefficiency underlying this dilemma: while fine-grained visual details are essential for detailed understanding, they are largely redundant for the preliminary task of selecting semantically relevant regions. } Motivated by this, we introduce VideoMM, which marks a paradigm shift from model-centric downsizing to adaptive perceptual granularity. Specifically, our framework {decouples selection from reasoning} by executing semantic filtering on a cost-effective Macro Proxy (derived from downscaled frames), and projecting the selected regions onto high-fidelity Micro Tokens for detailed understanding only when necessary. Extensive evaluations show that VideoMM significantly outperforms existing solutions. It achieves a 6.13$\times$ speedup and a 7.4% accuracy gain over full-context baselines on LongVideoBench, and further accelerates inference by 2.73$\times$ over current leading methods, establishing a highly scalable paradigm for long-video understanding. Our code is available at: https://github.com/adfh917k/VideoMM.