Papers › Understanding Long Videos with Multimodal Language Models

Understanding Long Videos with Multimodal Language Models

25 Mar 2024arXiv:2403.16998archive 2025-07-28

Kanchana Ranasinghe, Xiang Li, Kumara Kahatapitiya, Michael S. Ryoo

Large Language Models (LLMs) have allowed recent LLM-based approaches to achieve excellent performance on long-video understanding benchmarks. We investigate how extensive world knowledge and strong reasoning skills of underlying LLMs influence this strong performance. Surprisingly, we discover that LLM-based approaches can yield surprisingly good accuracy on long-video tasks with limited video information, sometimes even with no video specific information. Building on this, we exploring injecting video-specific information into an LLM-based framework. We utilize off-the-shelf vision tools to extract three object-centric information modalities from videos and then leverage natural language as a medium for fusing this information. Our resulting Multimodal Video Understanding (MVU) framework demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across multiple video understanding benchmarks. Strong performance also on robotics domain tasks establish its strong generality. Our code will be released publicly.

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Tasks

Action RecognitionFine-grained Action RecognitionLanguage ModellingMultiple-choiceVideo UnderstandingWorld KnowledgeZero-Shot Video Question Answerzero-shot long video question answering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Zero-Shot Video Question Answer EgoSchema (fullset) MVU (13B) Accuracy 37.6 #21 of 29 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Question Answer EgoSchema (subset) MVU (13B) Accuracy 60.3 #8 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Question Answer EgoSchema (subset) MVU (13B) Inference Speed (s) 2.42 #8 of 14 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Video Question Answer NExT-QA MVU (13B) Accuracy 55.2 #24 of 27 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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