CyberV: Cybernetics for Test-time Scaling in Video Understanding

TL;DR

CyberV introduces a cybernetic framework for adaptive, test-time scaling of multimodal large language models, significantly improving their robustness and accuracy in understanding complex videos without retraining.

Contribution

The paper presents CyberV, a novel cybernetic-inspired framework that enables self-monitoring and dynamic resource allocation in video MLLMs during inference, enhancing performance without retraining.

Findings

Boosts Qwen2.5-VL-7B by 8.3% on VideoMMMU

Improves InternVL3-8B by 5.5% on VideoMMMU

Achieves 10.0% improvement on Qwen2.5-VL-72B, comparable to human experts

Abstract

Current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) may struggle with understanding long or complex videos due to computational demands at test time, lack of robustness, and limited accuracy, primarily stemming from their feed-forward processing nature. These limitations could be more severe for models with fewer parameters. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework inspired by cybernetic principles, redesigning video MLLMs as adaptive systems capable of self-monitoring, self-correction, and dynamic resource allocation during inference. Our approach, CyberV, introduces a cybernetic loop consisting of an MLLM Inference System, a Sensor, and a Controller. Specifically, the sensor monitors forward processes of the MLLM and collects intermediate interpretations, such as attention drift, then the controller determines when and how to trigger self-correction and generate feedback to guide the next round. This test-time adaptive scaling framework enhances frozen MLLMs without requiring retraining or additional components. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements: CyberV boosts Qwen2.5-VL-7B by 8.3% and InternVL3-8B by 5.5% on VideoMMMU, surpassing the competitive proprietary model GPT-4o. When applied to Qwen2.5-VL-72B, it yields a 10.0% improvement, achieving performance even comparable to human experts. Furthermore, our method demonstrates consistent gains on general-purpose benchmarks, such as VideoMME and WorldSense, highlighting its effectiveness and generalization capabilities in making MLLMs more robust and accurate for dynamic video understanding. The code is released at https://github.com/marinero4972/CyberV.