Beyond Frame Selection: Generative Latent Evidence Aggregation for Long-Video Understanding

Long-video question answering requires identifying sparse yet critical evidence from videos containing thousands of frames under a constrained visual-token budget. Existing methods either select query-aware frames in a single pass or rely on timestamped text solely as retrieval guidance, leading to two key limitations. First, selected frames tend to cluster around local relevance peaks, and once the budget is exhausted, omitted evidence cannot be recovered. Second, textual and visual evidence remain weakly aligned. We propose GCR, a training-free framework that casts fixed-budget frame selection as a joint evidence curation problem. Ground converts timestamped text into temporal events, selects query-relevant real frame anchors, and renders each event text onto its temporally aligned frame. Cover supplements grounded events with direct visual anchors for complementary visual evidence and applies global maximal marginal relevance to preserve diverse context. Refine revisits omitted temporal regions and replaces the weakest revisable context frame with a real-frame medoid---but only when the medoid offers greater evidence value. GCR maintains a fixed number of chronologically ordered frames and requires no VLM training or architectural modification. Experiments on LongVideoBench and Video-MME, across three 7B backbones and frame budgets of 8, 32, and 64, demonstrate consistent improvements in long-video QA. With the 7B LLaVA-OV backbone and 32 frames, GCR achieves 64.25% and 62.15% on the two benchmarks, outperforming the strongest reproduced baselines by 2.54 and 1.93 percentage points, respectively.

Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have enabled performance on long-video understanding tasks. However, existing methods still face two key limitations: evidence acquisition often relies on a single search intent, and answer generation lacks an effective visual feedback mechanism. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{CoVER}, a Comprehensive Visual Evidence and Reflection framework for long-video understanding. CoVER enables Video-LLMs to \textbf{See More} by dynamically gathering query-expanded visual evidence, and \textbf{Think Deeper} by verifying draft answers with effective answer-specific visual feedback. Together, these mechanisms shift long-video understanding from answer-centric generation to evidence-centric and visually verifiable reasoning. Experimental results show that CoVER-7B substantially outperforms models with the same parameter scale and even surpasses state-of-the-art closed-source models on certain metrics.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made strong progress in video understanding, yet long videos remain difficult: the visual token budget grows with video length, so temporally sparse evidence is easily lost. Existing methods compress the input through uniform sampling or frame selection, but these strategies optimize different objectives, either broad temporal coverage or local question relevance, and neither preserves both global storyline context and fine-grained evidence. We propose VideoRouter (VR), which rethinks long-video understanding as coordinating complementary evidence views rather than selecting a single subset of frames. VideoRouter first organizes each video into a question-agnostic temporal hierarchy that partitions it into coarse-to-fine temporally coherent segments. Upper-level nodes capture broad storyline context and event progression, while lower-level nodes preserve fine-grained local details and evidence-bearing moments. This gives rise to two complementary views: a global view for coverage-oriented reasoning and a local view for detail-oriented evidence recovery. We further introduce a verification-guided router that judges which view is better supported by its own selected evidence and decides the final answer. Across six backbones, routing improves over both views in all settings, and the choice of view is shown to be dataset-dependent, confirming that no single evidence granularity is universally preferable. On VideoMME, our method outperforms state-of-the-art frame selection methods by 2.5 points, under the LLaVA-Video-7B backbone. We will release the code.