Organizations: New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Kling Team · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Peking University · Nanjing University
Detailed video captioning has become an essential semantic interface for multi-modal understanding and generation. While existing methods mainly target short videos, extending them to long videos remains challenging, primarily due to limited context windows of current video understanding models. A naive solution is to adopt segment-wise captioning followed by concatenation, yet this paradigm often suffers from inconsistent subject references and fragmented long-range narratives. To mitigate these issues, we introduce PIGEONS, an incremental long-video captioning model built upon a Persistent Identity Gallery and an Evolving Overarching Narrative Summary. Before caption generation, PIGEONS scans the entire video to construct an identity gallery that captures key subjects along with their visual references, thereby providing a stable referential anchor. The model then performs clip-by-clip captioning conditioned on the persistent gallery and an evolving overarching narrative summary, which compactly maintains and updates essential long-range contextual information after each captioning step. To enable these capabilities, we develop a three-stage training strategy that integrates supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PIGEONS markedly improves long-video captioning performance, achieving superior accuracy, completeness, and subject referential consistency over existing methods, while maintaining competitive performance on short-video captioning.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Downstream impacts of inconsistent subject references in naive segment-wise captioning. In understanding tasks, using such captions as the memory of an LLM agent may induce reasoning failures due to identity ambiguity. In generation tasks, leveraging these captions for video reconstruction could lead to subject collapse. Identical colors represent the same ground-truth subject.
Figure 2: Inference pipeline of PIGEONS. The model first scans all video clips to construct a global identity gallery. Guided by this gallery, it sequentially generates captions for each clip, with consistent subject references in italic . Concurrently, an overarching narrative summary is dynamically updated to help enhance long-range coherence and information density of the generated captions.
Figure 3: Overview of the three-stage training strategy. Stage 1 conducts SFT for identity gallery construction with self-review and refinement. Stage 2 further optimizes gallery construction via RL, improving both accuracy ( Racc ) and efficiency ( Reff ). Stage 3 performs caption SFT, enabling detailed caption generation conditioned on multiple contexts while evolving the overarching narrative summary. For clarity, only one clip from a full video is shown and the candidate gallery is omitted.
Model
Overall
(0, 2] min
(2, 5] min
(5, 8] min
(8, 10] min
Acc
Cov
Ref
Acc
Cov
Ref
Acc
Cov
Ref
Acc
Cov
Ref
Acc
Cov
Ref
Gemini-3.1-Pro
42.5
53.3
39.1
40.9
53.4
42.4
44.7
54.8
40.4
42.4
52.7
35.3
42.2
51.6
35.4
Gemini-3-Flash
41.5
52.8
39.6
42.8
55.9
46.3
42.1
52.9
38.1
41.1
51.3
36.6
38.5
48.3
32.3
Qwen2.5-Omni
5.1
13.2
0.6
6.7
17.4
1.2
5.9
13.7
0.5
3.4
10.0
0.3
2.6
8.5
0.1
OmniVinci
5.9
13.3
1.2
9.9
21.2
2.5
5.3
12.0
0.6
3.2
8.3
0.4
2.5
6.2
0.5
ARC-Qwen-Video
6.9
10.9
2.0
9.2
15.3
3.4
7.2
11.0
1.8
5.8
9.0
1.4
2.8
4.4
0.4
Table 1: Model performance on CapRiCorn-1K, which evaluates overall caption quality (Acc & Cov) and subject referential consistency (Ref) across temporal scales.
Model
UGC-VideoCap
WorldSense (Acc by Caption)
Audio
Visual
Detail
Avg
(0, 2] min
(2, 4] min
(4, 6] min
(6, 8] min
(8, 12] min
Gemini-3.1-Pro
72.6
77.8
76.2
75.6
28.8
27.9
29.9
26.5
36.2
Gemini-3-Flash
71.4
76.7
75.1
74.4
25.8
24.7
24.4
23.5
30.2
Qwen2.5-Omni
46.9
66.1
60.0
57.7
10.5
6.6
4.5
3.7
4.0
UGC-VideoCaptioner
61.4
58.4
57.5
59.1
12.9
8.9
6.3
8.8
7.4
video-SALMONN-2
61.8
71.4
68.5
67.2
18.4
17.3
17.2
17.7
22.2
Table 2: Model performance on UGC-VideoCap, which contains videos shorter than 60 seconds, and WorldSense, where caption quality is evaluated by prompting a judge model (Gemini-2.5-Pro ( Comanici et al., 2025 ) , following AVoCaDO) to answer questions based on the generated captions.
Row
Model
Segment & Concat
Training Recipe
CapRiCorn-1K
IG-SFT
IG-RL
Cap-SFT
Acc
Cov
Ref
1
Qwen3-Omni-Ins
✗
–
–
–
10.3
20.2
1.6
2
✓
–
–
–
24.5
37.8
9.6
3
Qwen3-Omni-Ins
✓
Cap-SFT w/o IG
49.1
64.4
28.1
4
✓
–
–
①
49.0
64.0
49.4
5
✓
–
②
①
47.4
62.6
48.4
Table 3: Ablation studies of the three-stage training strategy. “Segment & Concat” refers to segment-wise captioning followed by concatenation. “IG” and “Cap” denote identity gallery and caption, respectively. Circled numbers indicate the actual training order of each stage.
Model
CapRiCorn-1K
Avg Caption Length
Acc
Cov
Ref
AVoCaDO-Concat
49.8
64.1
34.1
3025.7
PIGEONS (Ours)
50.7
65.4
51.8
1271.5
Table 4: Comparison with AVoCaDO-based segment-wise captioning and concatenation.
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 4: Qualitative captioning results of PIGEONS. Complex cross-segment subject references involving changes in clothing are underlined , highlighting PIGEONS’s robustness in maintaining accurate subject referential consistency. The overarching narrative summaries are omitted for clarity.
Figure 5: Qualitative captioning results of PIGEONS. Complex cross-segment subject references involving changes in clothing are underlined , highlighting PIGEONS’s robustness in maintaining accurate subject referential consistency. The overarching narrative summaries are omitted for clarity.
Long-form video generation requires recurring subjects to remain consistent across various shots, viewpoints, motions, and scene transitions. Existing temporal decomposition methods improve scalability by generating videos shot by shot. However, they mainly focus on optimizing plausible next-shot continuations without verifying whether the historical memory preserves identity-critical subject evidence. Consequently, as generation proceeds, recurring subjects may be diluted, overwritten, or forgotten. In this paper, we propose Memento, a subject-reconstruction-guided framework that treats subject preservation as an explicit identity grounding problem, based on the premise that a memory bank faithfully preserving a subject should support reconstructing that subject from memory alone. Specifically, Memento jointly trains autoregressive next-shot generation with memory-based subject reconstruction, recovering target appearances using historical memory and global story captions. To disentangle long-range subject evidence from short-range cues, Memento introduces a dual-query memory mechanism, where one query retrieves identity-relevant memory and the other selects short-context keyframes for coherent continuation. Additionally, a subject-aware cinematic data pipeline provides precise reconstruction supervision via consistent, pronoun-free subject descriptions. Experiments demonstrate that Memento achieves state-of-the-art performance in long-term subject consistency, cross-shot coherence, and visual quality.
The advent of always-on personal AI assistants, enabled by all-day wearable devices such as smart glasses, demands a new level of contextual understanding, one that goes beyond short, isolated events to encompass the continuous, longitudinal stream of egocentric video. Achieving this vision requires advances in long-horizon video understanding, where systems must interpret and recall visual and audio information spanning days or even weeks. Existing methods, including large language models and retrieval-augmented generation, are constrained by limited context windows and lack the ability to perform compositional, multi-hop reasoning over very long video streams. In this work, we address these challenges through EGAgent, an enhanced agentic framework centered on entity scene graphs, which represent people, places, objects, and their relationships over time. Our system equips a planning agent with tools for structured search and reasoning over these graphs, as well as hybrid visual and audio search capabilities, enabling detailed, cross-modal, and temporally coherent reasoning. Experiments on the EgoLifeQA and Video-MME (Long) datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on EgoLifeQA (57.5%) and competitive performance on Video-MME (Long) (74.1%) for complex longitudinal video understanding tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/egagent.
Aniket Rege, Arka Sadhu, Yuliang Li +5
Reality Labs Research at Meta · University of Wisconsin-Madison · Work done during internship at Meta
This paper addresses the critical and underexplored challenge of long video understanding with low computational budgets. We propose LongVideo-R1, an active, reasoning-equipped multimodal large language model (MLLM) agent designed for efficient video context navigation, avoiding the redundancy of exhaustive search. At the core of LongVideo-R1 lies a reasoning module that leverages high-level visual cues to infer the most informative video clip for subsequent processing. During inference, the agent initiates traversal from top-level visual summaries and iteratively refines its focus, immediately halting the exploration process upon acquiring sufficient knowledge to answer the query. To facilitate training, we first extract hierarchical video captions from CGBench, a video corpus with grounding annotations, and guide GPT-5 to generate 33K high-quality chain-of-thought-with-tool trajectories. The LongVideo-R1 agent is fine-tuned upon the Qwen-3-8B model through a two-stage paradigm: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL), where RL employs a specifically designed reward function to maximize selective and efficient clip navigation. Experiments on multiple long video benchmarks validate the effectiveness of name, which enjoys superior tradeoff between QA accuracy and efficiency. All curated data and source code are provided in the supplementary material and will be made publicly available. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/qiujihao19/LongVideo-R1
Jihao Qiu, Lingxi Xie, Xinyue Huo +2
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Huawei Consumer Business Group