FlexSelect: Flexible Token Selection for Efficient Long Video Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhang, Yunzhu, Lu, Yu, Wang, Tianyi, Rao, Fengyun, Yang, Yi, Zhu, Linchao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912408691277824
author Zhang, Yunzhu
Lu, Yu
Wang, Tianyi
Rao, Fengyun
Yang, Yi
Zhu, Linchao
author_facet Zhang, Yunzhu
Lu, Yu
Wang, Tianyi
Rao, Fengyun
Yang, Yi
Zhu, Linchao
contents Long-form video understanding poses a significant challenge for video large language models (VideoLLMs) due to prohibitively high computational and memory demands. In this paper, we propose FlexSelect, a flexible and efficient token selection strategy for processing long videos. FlexSelect identifies and retains the most semantically relevant content by leveraging cross-modal attention patterns from a reference transformer layer. It comprises two key components: (1) a training-free token ranking pipeline that leverages faithful cross-modal attention weights to estimate each video token's importance, and (2) a rank-supervised lightweight selector that is trained to replicate these rankings and filter redundant tokens. This generic approach can be seamlessly integrated into various VideoLLM architectures, such as LLaVA-Video, InternVL and Qwen-VL, serving as a plug-and-play module to extend their temporal context length. Empirically, FlexSelect delivers strong gains across multiple long-video benchmarks including VideoMME, MLVU, LongVB, and LVBench. Moreover, it achieves significant speed-ups (for example, up to 9 times on a LLaVA-Video-7B model), highlighting FlexSelect's promise for efficient long-form video understanding. Project page available at: https://yunzhuzhang0918.github.io/flex_select
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00993
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FlexSelect: Flexible Token Selection for Efficient Long Video Understanding
Zhang, Yunzhu
Lu, Yu
Wang, Tianyi
Rao, Fengyun
Yang, Yi
Zhu, Linchao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Long-form video understanding poses a significant challenge for video large language models (VideoLLMs) due to prohibitively high computational and memory demands. In this paper, we propose FlexSelect, a flexible and efficient token selection strategy for processing long videos. FlexSelect identifies and retains the most semantically relevant content by leveraging cross-modal attention patterns from a reference transformer layer. It comprises two key components: (1) a training-free token ranking pipeline that leverages faithful cross-modal attention weights to estimate each video token's importance, and (2) a rank-supervised lightweight selector that is trained to replicate these rankings and filter redundant tokens. This generic approach can be seamlessly integrated into various VideoLLM architectures, such as LLaVA-Video, InternVL and Qwen-VL, serving as a plug-and-play module to extend their temporal context length. Empirically, FlexSelect delivers strong gains across multiple long-video benchmarks including VideoMME, MLVU, LongVB, and LVBench. Moreover, it achieves significant speed-ups (for example, up to 9 times on a LLaVA-Video-7B model), highlighting FlexSelect's promise for efficient long-form video understanding. Project page available at: https://yunzhuzhang0918.github.io/flex_select
title FlexSelect: Flexible Token Selection for Efficient Long Video Understanding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00993