SlowFocus: Enhancing Fine-grained Temporal Understanding in Video LLM

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nie, Ming, Ding, Dan, Wang, Chunwei, Guo, Yuanfan, Han, Jianhua, Xu, Hang, Zhang, Li
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Nie, Ming
Ding, Dan
Wang, Chunwei
Guo, Yuanfan
Han, Jianhua
Xu, Hang
Zhang, Li
author_facet Nie, Ming
Ding, Dan
Wang, Chunwei
Guo, Yuanfan
Han, Jianhua
Xu, Hang
Zhang, Li
contents Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in text understanding, which has paved the way for their expansion into video LLMs (Vid-LLMs) to analyze video data. However, current Vid-LLMs struggle to simultaneously retain high-quality frame-level semantic information (i.e., a sufficient number of tokens per frame) and comprehensive video-level temporal information (i.e., an adequate number of sampled frames per video). This limitation hinders the advancement of Vid-LLMs towards fine-grained video understanding. To address this issue, we introduce the SlowFocus mechanism, which significantly enhances the equivalent sampling frequency without compromising the quality of frame-level visual tokens. SlowFocus begins by identifying the query-related temporal segment based on the posed question, then performs dense sampling on this segment to extract local high-frequency features. A multi-frequency mixing attention module is further leveraged to aggregate these local high-frequency details with global low-frequency contexts for enhanced temporal comprehension. Additionally, to tailor Vid-LLMs to this innovative mechanism, we introduce a set of training strategies aimed at bolstering both temporal grounding and detailed temporal reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, we establish FineAction-CGR, a benchmark specifically devised to assess the ability of Vid-LLMs to process fine-grained temporal understanding tasks. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our mechanism across both existing public video understanding benchmarks and our proposed FineAction-CGR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_03589
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SlowFocus: Enhancing Fine-grained Temporal Understanding in Video LLM
Nie, Ming
Ding, Dan
Wang, Chunwei
Guo, Yuanfan
Han, Jianhua
Xu, Hang
Zhang, Li
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in text understanding, which has paved the way for their expansion into video LLMs (Vid-LLMs) to analyze video data. However, current Vid-LLMs struggle to simultaneously retain high-quality frame-level semantic information (i.e., a sufficient number of tokens per frame) and comprehensive video-level temporal information (i.e., an adequate number of sampled frames per video). This limitation hinders the advancement of Vid-LLMs towards fine-grained video understanding. To address this issue, we introduce the SlowFocus mechanism, which significantly enhances the equivalent sampling frequency without compromising the quality of frame-level visual tokens. SlowFocus begins by identifying the query-related temporal segment based on the posed question, then performs dense sampling on this segment to extract local high-frequency features. A multi-frequency mixing attention module is further leveraged to aggregate these local high-frequency details with global low-frequency contexts for enhanced temporal comprehension. Additionally, to tailor Vid-LLMs to this innovative mechanism, we introduce a set of training strategies aimed at bolstering both temporal grounding and detailed temporal reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, we establish FineAction-CGR, a benchmark specifically devised to assess the ability of Vid-LLMs to process fine-grained temporal understanding tasks. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our mechanism across both existing public video understanding benchmarks and our proposed FineAction-CGR.
title SlowFocus: Enhancing Fine-grained Temporal Understanding in Video LLM
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03589