Overview

Long-video understanding studies how models can answer questions, track entities, and reason about events spread across minutes or hours of video. Common approaches select or compress frames, build hierarchical visual or event memories, and use retrieval tools or agents to find and verify relevant evidence; some also combine audio, speech, and video. Benchmarks such as Video-MME, LongVideoBench, LVBench, and MLVU test temporal grounding, long-range recall, and multi-event reasoning, and results show that strong short-clip performance does not guarantee reliable long-video understanding. A central tension is how to reduce computation without losing sparse or distant evidence, while improving grounding, temporal consistency, and the ability to recognize when evidence is insufficient.

Latest papers

CardsList

154 papers13 papers in the last four weeks, down 24% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. LF-VideoQA: Evaluating Long-Video Understanding with Long-Form Theory-of-Mind Questions

    Oct 30, 2026Shaden Shaar, Bradon Thymes, Majd Aldaye +2Long-Video QALong-Video Understanding

  2. Diagnosing and Correcting Bias in MLLM for Long Video Understanding

    Oct 26, 2026Xusheng Liang, Jianqiao Sun, Hao Zhang +3Long-Video UnderstandingVisual Evidence Sensitivity in VLMs

  3. 4DMemory: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Spatiotemporal Memory with Harness-Augmented Agents

    Oct 23, 2026Yanhao Jia, Yi Zhu, Yiran Zhong +7Long-Horizon Agent EvaluationTemporal Reasoning in VLMs

  4. From Label Priors to Task Evidence: Efficient Long-Video Frame Selection via Bayesian GRPO

    Oct 18, 2026Shuochen Chang, Bingjie Gao, Qingyang Liu +7Long-Video UnderstandingQuery-Aware Video Frame Selection

  5. Write Once, Query Many: Evolving Compact Reusable Memory for Long Videos

    Oct 17, 2026Kerui Chen, Jinglu Wang, Yun Wang +2Memory-Augmented Video UnderstandingMemory-Augmented VLMs

  6. FrameScout: Scouting Query-Relevant Frames for Long Video Understanding

    Oct 13, 2026Haonan Hu, Shuhao Chen, Weisen Jiang +3Query-Aware Video Frame SelectionLong-Video Understanding

  7. Elephant in the Fridge: Constant-Memory Frame Packing for Long Video Understanding

    Oct 12, 2026Shuo Gao, Chenhao Zheng, Zhongzheng RenLong-Video UnderstandingEfficient VLM Inference

  8. VideoEvolve: Co-Evolving Memory and Retrieval for Long Video Understanding

    Oct 7, 2026Yongchao Xu, Bowen Ye, Jiefeng Gan +5Long-Video UnderstandingMemory-Augmented Video Understanding

  9. RACER: Reflective Agent Coupling Query Interpretation and Tool-Based Retrieval for Frame Selection in Long Video Understanding

    Oct 6, 2026Yiyang Huang, Yitian Zhang, Yizhou Wang +6Long-Video UnderstandingQuery-Aware Video Frame Selection

  10. EC-RAG: Event Chain Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Long Video Understanding

    Oct 6, 2026Yuhao Qin, Junbo Wang, Yuke Li +1Multimodal RAGVideo-Language Models

  11. VideoTapestry: Query-Adaptive Memory Refinement for Multi-Agent Long-Video Understanding

    Oct 5, 2026Yucheng Liu, Yufei Yin, Mingxiao Feng +3Long-Video UnderstandingMemory-Augmented Video Understanding

  12. Rethinking Long-Video Efficiency: A Joint Allocation Perspective on Frames, Pixels, and Front-End Latency

    Oct 3, 2026Sixun Dong, Wei Li, Andong Deng +4Efficient VLM InferenceLong-Video Understanding

  13. VideoLoop: Looped Working Memory Against Semantic Thrashing in Long-Form Video Agents

    Sep 29, 2026Jianming Xu, Jinfa Huang, Jingyang Lin +2Memory-Augmented VLMsLong-Video Understanding

  14. LazySloth: Bounded LLM-based Lazy Tree Search for Fast Long Video Comprehension

    Sep 29, 2026Arka Mukherjee, Kaleen Shrestha, Larissa Zhu +1Efficient VLM InferenceLong-Video Understanding

  15. KeyRec: Bounded Visual Memory for Streaming and Long-Video Understanding

    Sep 26, 2026Zihan Chen, Xuejian Rong, Xiaojuan Wang +4Long-Video UnderstandingMemory-Augmented Video Understanding

  16. CueKFS: Agentic Cue-Driven Keyframe Selection for Long Video Understanding

    Sep 25, 2026Weitai Kang, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Yumo Xu +3Query-Aware Video Frame SelectionLong-Video Understanding

  17. PREM: Prefix-Steered Recurrent Memory for Long-Video Understanding

    Sep 20, 2026Siru Zhong, Qiongyan Wang, Xiaohui Lv +5Memory-Augmented VLMsRecurrent Neural Networks

  18. VideoMM: Adaptive Macro-Micro Inference for Efficient Video MLLMs

    Sep 15, 2026Haoyu Guo, Yuan Feng, Junlin Lv +3Efficient VLM InferenceLong-Video Understanding

  19. MarKey: Marginal Utility Guided Greedy Keyframe Selection for Long Video Understanding

    Sep 14, 2026Hongchang Shi, Jinpeng Hu, Ao Wang +4Long-Video UnderstandingVideo Frame Selection

  20. Caption-once, Frames-on-Demand: Visual-Need Routing for Budget-Aware Agentic Long Video Understanding

    Sep 10, 2026Weitong Cai, Hang Zhang, Yukai Huang +6Memory-Augmented VLMsEfficient VLM Inference

  21. Kairos: A Dataset for Fine-Grained Video-Language Modeling over Space, Time, and Dynamics

    Sep 8, 2026Ruibo Ming, Lei Sun, Deheng Zhang +8Video-Language Model EvaluationVideo-Language Models

  22. CausalChapter: Improving Long-Video Chaptering with Interventional Dependency Modeling

    Sep 8, 2026Xinran Duan, Guozhang Li, Yaoyao Zhong +3Long-Context ModelingLong-Video Understanding