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Main Authors: Liu, Shuming, Zhao, Chen, Xu, Tianqi, Ghanem, Bernard
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21483
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author Liu, Shuming
Zhao, Chen
Xu, Tianqi
Ghanem, Bernard
author_facet Liu, Shuming
Zhao, Chen
Xu, Tianqi
Ghanem, Bernard
contents Large video-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated promising progress in various video understanding tasks. However, their effectiveness in long-form video analysis is constrained by limited context windows. Traditional approaches, such as uniform frame sampling, often inevitably allocate resources to irrelevant content, diminishing their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce BOLT, a method to BOost Large VLMs without additional Training through a comprehensive study of frame selection strategies. First, to enable a more realistic evaluation of VLMs in long-form video understanding, we propose a multi-source retrieval evaluation setting. Our findings reveal that uniform sampling performs poorly in noisy contexts, underscoring the importance of selecting the right frames. Second, we explore several frame selection strategies based on query-frame similarity and analyze their effectiveness at inference time. Our results show that inverse transform sampling yields the most significant performance improvement, increasing accuracy on the Video-MME benchmark from 53.8% to 56.1% and MLVU benchmark from 58.9% to 63.4%. Our code is available at https://github.com/sming256/BOLT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_21483
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BOLT: Boost Large Vision-Language Model Without Training for Long-form Video Understanding
Liu, Shuming
Zhao, Chen
Xu, Tianqi
Ghanem, Bernard
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large video-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated promising progress in various video understanding tasks. However, their effectiveness in long-form video analysis is constrained by limited context windows. Traditional approaches, such as uniform frame sampling, often inevitably allocate resources to irrelevant content, diminishing their effectiveness in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce BOLT, a method to BOost Large VLMs without additional Training through a comprehensive study of frame selection strategies. First, to enable a more realistic evaluation of VLMs in long-form video understanding, we propose a multi-source retrieval evaluation setting. Our findings reveal that uniform sampling performs poorly in noisy contexts, underscoring the importance of selecting the right frames. Second, we explore several frame selection strategies based on query-frame similarity and analyze their effectiveness at inference time. Our results show that inverse transform sampling yields the most significant performance improvement, increasing accuracy on the Video-MME benchmark from 53.8% to 56.1% and MLVU benchmark from 58.9% to 63.4%. Our code is available at https://github.com/sming256/BOLT.
title BOLT: Boost Large Vision-Language Model Without Training for Long-form Video Understanding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.21483