Question-guided Visual Compression with Memory Feedback for Long-Term Video Understanding

TL;DR

This paper introduces QViC-MF, a feedback-driven framework that enhances long-term video understanding by selectively compressing visual information related to questions, leading to significant performance improvements on multiple benchmarks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel question-guided visual compression with memory feedback mechanism that improves understanding of long videos over existing methods.

Findings

Achieves 6.1% improvement on MLVU test

Achieves 8.3% improvement on LVBench

Achieves 18.3% improvement on VNBench Long

Abstract

In the context of long-term video understanding with large multimodal models, many frameworks have been proposed. Although transformer-based visual compressors and memory-augmented approaches are often used to process long videos, they usually compress each frame independently and therefore fail to achieve strong performance on tasks that require understanding complete events, such as temporal ordering tasks in MLVU and VNBench. This motivates us to rethink the conventional one-way scheme from perception to memory, and instead establish a feedbackdriven process in which past visual contexts stored in the context memory can benefit ongoing perception. To this end, we propose Question-guided Visual Compression with Memory Feedback (QViC-MF), a framework for long-term video understanding. At its core is a Question-guided Multimodal Selective Attention (QMSA), which learns to preserve visual information related to the given question from both the current clip and the past related frames from the memory. The compressor and memory feedback work iteratively for each clip of the entire video. This simple yet effective design yields large performance gains on longterm video understanding tasks. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant improvement over current state-of-the-art methods by 6.1% on MLVU test, 8.3% on LVBench, 18.3% on VNBench Long, and 3.7% on VideoMME Long. The code will be released publicly.