Iterative Zoom-In: Temporal Interval Exploration for Long Video Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Li, Chenglin, Chen, Qianglong, fengtao, Zhang, Yin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Li, Chenglin
Chen, Qianglong
fengtao
Zhang, Yin
author_facet Li, Chenglin
Chen, Qianglong
fengtao
Zhang, Yin
contents Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in video understanding tasks. However, they continue to struggle with long-form videos because of an inefficient perception of temporal intervals. Unlike humans, who can dynamically adjust their temporal focus to locate query-relevant moments, current MLLMs often rely on dense, uniform sampling across the video timeline, leading to high memory consumption and a risk of missing crucial information. To address this challenge, we introduce Temporal Search, a training-free framework that enables MLLMs to explore temporal regions for improved long video understanding iteratively. TS is based on a key observation: the model's generation confidence across different temporal intervals is highly correlated with prediction accuracy. TS operates through two main iterative stages. First, the MLLM proposes a temporal interval that is likely to contain task-relevant information. Then, it samples a fixed number of frames from the interval, regardless of length, and feeds them into the model to produce a refined response and confidence score. TS refines the focus of the model by iteratively shifting attention to more fine-grained temporal intervals, improving its understanding of long videos. Additionally, keyframe-level descriptions are collected to facilitate cross-interval perception throughout the video. To further improve efficiency, we introduce TS-BFS, a best-first search strategy over a tree. Each node represents a candidate interval and is expanded via two methods: self-driven proposals and uniform partitioning. Nodes are scored based on confidence and self-evaluation, and the most promising one is selected for continued exploration.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_02946
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Iterative Zoom-In: Temporal Interval Exploration for Long Video Understanding
Li, Chenglin
Chen, Qianglong
fengtao
Zhang, Yin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in video understanding tasks. However, they continue to struggle with long-form videos because of an inefficient perception of temporal intervals. Unlike humans, who can dynamically adjust their temporal focus to locate query-relevant moments, current MLLMs often rely on dense, uniform sampling across the video timeline, leading to high memory consumption and a risk of missing crucial information. To address this challenge, we introduce Temporal Search, a training-free framework that enables MLLMs to explore temporal regions for improved long video understanding iteratively. TS is based on a key observation: the model's generation confidence across different temporal intervals is highly correlated with prediction accuracy. TS operates through two main iterative stages. First, the MLLM proposes a temporal interval that is likely to contain task-relevant information. Then, it samples a fixed number of frames from the interval, regardless of length, and feeds them into the model to produce a refined response and confidence score. TS refines the focus of the model by iteratively shifting attention to more fine-grained temporal intervals, improving its understanding of long videos. Additionally, keyframe-level descriptions are collected to facilitate cross-interval perception throughout the video. To further improve efficiency, we introduce TS-BFS, a best-first search strategy over a tree. Each node represents a candidate interval and is expanded via two methods: self-driven proposals and uniform partitioning. Nodes are scored based on confidence and self-evaluation, and the most promising one is selected for continued exploration.
title Iterative Zoom-In: Temporal Interval Exploration for Long Video Understanding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02946