Query-Aware Video Frame Selection

Overview

This field studies how video-language models can answer questions about long or streaming videos by processing a small set of relevant frames instead of every frame. Methods score frames against the query, often combining semantic relevance with temporal coverage, diversity, event boundaries, or evidence from audio and model uncertainty; approaches range from training-free retrieval and greedy selection to learned policies and agentic search. Evaluations commonly use long-video question-answering benchmarks such as VideoMME, LongVideoBench, and MLVU, with growing attention to streaming settings and inference cost. The central challenge is selecting enough complementary evidence to preserve temporal context without wasting a limited frame or token budget, while ensuring methods generalize across queries, models, and videos.

Latest papers

CardsList

70 papers13 papers in the last four weeks, up 63% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. 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

  2. DeltaStreamer: Towards Human-Like Agentic Streaming Video Understanding

    Oct 14, 2026Boyuan Sun, Deshui Miao, Wenzhao Gao +8Streaming Video UnderstandingVideo QA

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

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

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

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

  5. 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

  6. Enhancing Long-Video VLM Embeddings with Query-Aware Streaming Latent Reasoning

    Oct 4, 2026Haozhe Chi, Song Jin, Yang Jin +1Multimodal EmbeddingVision-Language Retrieval

  7. 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

  8. Less Is More: Genetic Frame Selection for Efficient Novel View Synthesis

    Sep 28, 2026Diego E. Farchione, Ramzi Idoughi, Alberto Jaspe-Villanueva +1Novel View SynthesisFeed-Forward 3D Reconstruction

  9. 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

  10. Query-aligned video frame selection for long video understanding

    Sep 15, 2026Md. Safayet Islam, Dilip Sarkar, Liang LiangQuery-Aware Video Frame SelectionLong-Video QA

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

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

  12. One Skill Does Not Fit All: Automatic Discovery and Taxonomy-Guided Routing of Frame-Selection Skills for Long-Video Question Answering

    Sep 11, 2026Jian Hu, Zixu Cheng, Da Li +3LLM Agent Skill LearningLong-Video QA

  13. 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

  14. Evaluation of MLLM-Agnostic Plug-and-Play Keyframe Selection Methods for Long Video Understanding

    Sep 4, 2026Dilip Sarkar, Md. Safayet Islam, Liang LiangLong-Video UnderstandingVideo Frame Selection

  15. CoFiE: Coarse-to-Fine Evidence Selection for Efficient Streaming Video Understanding

    Sep 3, 2026Jing Jiang, Yiran Ling, Ruonan Li +2Streaming Video UnderstandingEfficient VLM Inference

  16. RIDGE: Region-Informed Derivative-Guided Evidence Selection for Long Video Understanding

    Aug 30, 2026Shanqing Xu, Meng Luo, Mengchen Qian +7Large Vision-Language ModelsLong-Video Understanding

  17. FrameScope: Temporal Data Valuation for Stream Active Learning in Autonomous Vehicle Systems

    Aug 24, 2026Yuheng Zhu, Man-Ki YoonActive LearningData Valuation

  18. TRACE: Temporal Retrieval with Anchored and Convergent Evidence for Long-Horizon Video Understanding

    Aug 23, 2026Pengyiang Liu, Junbo Niu, Xiaoyang Hu +4Video QALong-Video Understanding

  19. Memory Tree Guided Key Frame Querying for Efficient 3D Question Answering

    Aug 18, 2026Hsiang-Wei Huang, Fu-Chen Chen, Li-Wu Tsao +7Embodied QA3D VQA

  20. Evidence-Driven Dynamic Visual Selector for Efficient Long Video Understanding

    Aug 6, 2026Bo Zhang, Wenxin Wang, Feng Chen +4Efficient VLM InferenceLong-Video Understanding

  21. One Ranking, Any Budget: Matryoshka Evidence-to-Context Frame Selection for Long-Video Understanding

    Aug 6, 2026Wang Chen, Yu Chen, Xiang Wang +3Long-Video UnderstandingVideo Frame Selection

  22. When and Where to Look: Adaptive Visual Evidence Scheduling for Efficient Long Video Understanding

    Aug 4, 2026Ke Li, Jiayu Chen, Maoliang Li +5Efficient VLM InferenceLarge Vision-Language Models