Think, Then Verify: A Hypothesis-Verification Multi-Agent Framework for Long Video Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wang, Zheng, Chen, Haoran, Qin, Haoxuan, Wei, Zhipeng, Qian, Tianwen, Bai, Cong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Wang, Zheng
Chen, Haoran
Qin, Haoxuan
Wei, Zhipeng
Qian, Tianwen
Bai, Cong
author_facet Wang, Zheng
Chen, Haoran
Qin, Haoxuan
Wei, Zhipeng
Qian, Tianwen
Bai, Cong
contents Long video understanding is challenging due to dense visual redundancy, long-range temporal dependencies, and the tendency of chain-of-thought and retrieval-based agents to accumulate semantic drift and correlation-driven errors. We argue that long-video reasoning should begin not with reactive retrieval, but with deliberate task formulation: the model must first articulate what must be true in the video for each candidate answer to hold. This thinking-before-finding principle motivates VideoHV-Agent, a framework that reformulates video question answering as a structured hypothesis-verification process. Based on video summaries, a Thinker rewrites answer candidates into testable hypotheses, a Judge derives a discriminative clue specifying what evidence must be checked, a Verifier grounds and tests the clue using localized, fine-grained video content, and an Answer agent integrates validated evidence to produce the final answer. Experiments on three long-video understanding benchmarks show that VideoHV-Agent achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while providing enhanced interpretability, improved logical soundness, and lower computational cost. We make our code publicly available at: https://github.com/Haorane/VideoHV-Agent.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_04977
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Think, Then Verify: A Hypothesis-Verification Multi-Agent Framework for Long Video Understanding
Wang, Zheng
Chen, Haoran
Qin, Haoxuan
Wei, Zhipeng
Qian, Tianwen
Bai, Cong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Long video understanding is challenging due to dense visual redundancy, long-range temporal dependencies, and the tendency of chain-of-thought and retrieval-based agents to accumulate semantic drift and correlation-driven errors. We argue that long-video reasoning should begin not with reactive retrieval, but with deliberate task formulation: the model must first articulate what must be true in the video for each candidate answer to hold. This thinking-before-finding principle motivates VideoHV-Agent, a framework that reformulates video question answering as a structured hypothesis-verification process. Based on video summaries, a Thinker rewrites answer candidates into testable hypotheses, a Judge derives a discriminative clue specifying what evidence must be checked, a Verifier grounds and tests the clue using localized, fine-grained video content, and an Answer agent integrates validated evidence to produce the final answer. Experiments on three long-video understanding benchmarks show that VideoHV-Agent achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while providing enhanced interpretability, improved logical soundness, and lower computational cost. We make our code publicly available at: https://github.com/Haorane/VideoHV-Agent.
title Think, Then Verify: A Hypothesis-Verification Multi-Agent Framework for Long Video Understanding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04977