Papers for

video analysis teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Video agent learns to explore and understand long videos efficiently

VideoScout: Learning Agentic Active Exploration with Adaptive Reasoning Pacing for Long Video Understanding

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on short video understanding yet remain limited on long videos due to the limited visual context window. Prevailing approaches rely on uniform frame sampling or recent coarse-to-fine agentic zooming, both of which struggle to localize sparse, decisive evidence in sufficiently long videos. We formulate long video understanding as a \textbf{Sequential Evidence Acquisition (SEA)} problem, in which an agent reads the video turn by turn along the temporal axis, deciding at each turn how fast to watch, what evidence to retain, when to revisit uncertain segments, and when to stop and answer. Inspired by this view, we propose \textbf{VideoScout}, a multi-turn reasoning agent that instantiates the SEA paradigm through adaptive reasoning pacing. Specifically, by dynamically controlling the viewing pace, VideoScout enables efficient traversal of long videos within a bounded visual context window, allowing the agent to access more video content while balancing content analysis depth with reading efficiency. To train VideoScout, we construct VideoScout-66K, a set of over 66K high-quality exploration turns from 10K answer-verified trajectories, and adopt a two-stage pipeline: cold-start supervised fine-tuning teaches the agent per-turn output format, while the Decoupled Clip and Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithm performs trajectory-level reinforcement learning with a composite reward that jointly considers answer accuracy, output format compliance, and the temporal alignment between the agent's viewing progress and the teacher's answer timing measured by intersection-over-union (IoU). Extensive experiments on long video understanding and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our 7B model achieves strong performance compared with existing trained 7B agentic models.

Mon 14 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Understanding long videos is hard because you can only look at a few frames at a time. The authors treat this problem like an agent reading a book chapter by chapter—deciding how fast to read, which parts to remember, and when to go back for unclear sections. They built VideoScout, a smart system that adapts its watching speed to balance thoroughness and efficiency. It learns from lots of examples and improves through trial and error to better answer questions about long videos.
Open 2609.15606v1

MarKey improves keyframe selection for better long video understanding

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

Abstract: Long-video understanding remains challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) because densely encoding long frame sequences is computationally expensive, while uniform sampling under a limited visual budget can miss sparse yet decisive evidence. Recent training-free keyframe selection methods have enabled more efficient inference and yielded promising performance gains. However, many existing methods score frames largely in isolation without explicitly considering how each candidate complements the currently selected subset, potentially resulting in redundant selections and incomplete evidence coverage. To address this limitation, we propose MarKey, a training-free framework that formulates keyframe selection as subset-aware greedy optimization. At each iteration, MarKey scores each candidate using a tractable surrogate that jointly accounts for query relevance, marginal coverage gain, and context-dependent redundancy, and selects the frame with the highest utility. To make this iterative subset-aware evaluation efficient, MarKey uses a compact set of representative anchors to approximate full-video coverage and a bounded window of previously selected frames to limit context-dependent comparisons. Experiments on six benchmarks spanning holistic video understanding, human-centric video understanding, and open-ended video understanding demonstrate that MarKey consistently outperforms existing methods. Further analyses show robust gains across different MLLM backbones, model scales, and frame budgets.

Mon 14 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputation and Language
The gist
Understanding very long videos is hard because analyzing every frame takes too much computing power, and just picking frames evenly can miss important moments. The authors present MarKey, a method that selects key frames by considering which new frame adds the most new information without repeating what’s already chosen. MarKey looks at how each frame helps cover the video’s content while avoiding redundancy, and does this efficiently with smart shortcuts. Tests show MarKey picks better frames than other methods for various video understanding tasks.
Open 2609.15408v1

MemForest compresses agent memory to speed retrieval and save space

MemForest: Efficient Agent Memory Management via EventTree Partitioning and Progressive Merging

Abstract: Agent memory systems have demonstrated significant potential in long-term dialogue, personalized assistants, and video understanding. However, continuously accumulated memory introduces substantial storage and retrieval costs during inference. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{MemForest}, a general memory compression framework adaptable to various agent memory systems. Specifically, MemForest partitions historical memory into event-centric units by leveraging global semantic similarity and local temporal continuity. For each unit, it constructs a maximum spanning tree, termed an EventTree, and progressively merges redundant memory nodes by selecting high-weight edges, reducing storage overhead. Furthermore, we introduce an anchor-guided propagation retrieval mechanism that retrieves relevant memory nodes from the temporal neighborhoods of key nodes, improving retrieval accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MemForest. Under the unimodal Mem0 framework, MemForest retains \textbf{97.1%} of the original performance while compressing \textbf{50%} of historical memory across three benchmarks (LoCoMo, LongMemEval, and PersonaMem), achieving a \textbf{1.89x} retrieval speedup. Under the multimodal M3-Agent framework, it preserves \textbf{99.7%} of the original performance with a \textbf{50%} compression ratio across two benchmarks (M3-Bench-robot and M3-Bench-web), achieving a \textbf{2.24x} retrieval speedup. \textcolor{RoyalBlue}{\textit{Our code is available at [https://github.com/Celina-love-sweet/MemForest.}}](https://github.com/Celina-love-sweet/MemForest.}})

Tue 8 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Storing lots of information for AI agents over time can slow them down and use too much space. The MemForest method organizes this memory by grouping related events and merging repeated bits, cutting down storage by half. It also improves how the system finds important memories quickly. Tests showed that MemForest keeps almost the same accuracy while making retrieval almost twice as fast in both single-type and mixed-type memory systems.
Open 2609.08273v1