Papers › VidCtx: Context-aware Video Question Answering with Image Models
VidCtx: Context-aware Video Question Answering with Image Models
Andreas Goulas, Vasileios Mezaris, Ioannis Patras
To address computational and memory limitations of Large Multimodal Models in the Video Question-Answering task, several recent methods extract textual representations per frame (e.g., by captioning) and feed them to a Large Language Model (LLM) that processes them to produce the final response. However, in this way, the LLM does not have access to visual information and often has to process repetitive textual descriptions of nearby frames. To address those shortcomings, in this paper, we introduce VidCtx, a novel training-free VideoQA framework which integrates both modalities, i.e. both visual information from input frames and textual descriptions of others frames that give the appropriate context. More specifically, in the proposed framework a pre-trained Large Multimodal Model (LMM) is prompted to extract at regular intervals, question-aware textual descriptions (captions) of video frames. Those will be used as context when the same LMM will be prompted to answer the question at hand given as input a) a certain frame, b) the question and c) the context/caption of an appropriate frame. To avoid redundant information, we chose as context the descriptions of distant frames. Finally, a simple yet effective max pooling mechanism is used to aggregate the frame-level decisions. This methodology enables the model to focus on the relevant segments of the video and scale to a high number of frames. Experiments show that VidCtx achieves competitive performance among approaches that rely on open models on three public Video QA benchmarks, NExT-QA, IntentQA and STAR. Our code is available at https://github.com/IDT-ITI/VidCtx.
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Code
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zero-Shot Video Question Answer | IntentQA | VidCtx (7B) | Accuracy | 67.1 | #4 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Zero-Shot Video Question Answer | NExT-QA | VidCtx (7B) | Accuracy | 70.7 | #10 of 27 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Zero-Shot Video Question Answer | STAR Benchmark | VidCtx (7B) | Accuracy | 51.1 | #2 of 4 | 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.
Methods
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