Narrative Aligned Long Form Video Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Jain, Rahul, Doshi, Keval, Uzkent, Burak, Kessler, Garin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866915876364615680
author Jain, Rahul
Doshi, Keval
Uzkent, Burak
Kessler, Garin
author_facet Jain, Rahul
Doshi, Keval
Uzkent, Burak
Kessler, Garin
contents Recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has led to a surge of benchmarks for long-video reasoning. However, most existing benchmarks rely on localized cues and fail to capture narrative reasoning, the ability to track intentions, connect distant events, and reconstruct causal chains across an entire movie. We introduce NA-VQA, a benchmark designed to evaluate deep temporal and narrative reasoning in long-form videos. NA-VQA contains 88 full-length movies and 4.4K open-ended question-answer pairs, each grounded in multiple evidence spans labeled as Short, Medium, or Far to assess long-range dependencies. By requiring generative, multi-scene answers, NA-VQA tests whether models can integrate dispersed narrative information rather than rely on shallow pattern matching. To address the limitations of existing approaches, we propose Video-NaRA, a narrative-centric framework that builds event-level chains and stores them in a structured memory for retrieval during reasoning. Extensive experiments show that state-of-the-art MLLMs perform poorly on questions requiring far-range evidence, highlighting the need for explicit narrative modeling. Video-NaRA improves long-range reasoning performance by up to 3 percent, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling complex narrative structures. We will release NA-VQA upon publication.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_19481
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Narrative Aligned Long Form Video Question Answering
Jain, Rahul
Doshi, Keval
Uzkent, Burak
Kessler, Garin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has led to a surge of benchmarks for long-video reasoning. However, most existing benchmarks rely on localized cues and fail to capture narrative reasoning, the ability to track intentions, connect distant events, and reconstruct causal chains across an entire movie. We introduce NA-VQA, a benchmark designed to evaluate deep temporal and narrative reasoning in long-form videos. NA-VQA contains 88 full-length movies and 4.4K open-ended question-answer pairs, each grounded in multiple evidence spans labeled as Short, Medium, or Far to assess long-range dependencies. By requiring generative, multi-scene answers, NA-VQA tests whether models can integrate dispersed narrative information rather than rely on shallow pattern matching. To address the limitations of existing approaches, we propose Video-NaRA, a narrative-centric framework that builds event-level chains and stores them in a structured memory for retrieval during reasoning. Extensive experiments show that state-of-the-art MLLMs perform poorly on questions requiring far-range evidence, highlighting the need for explicit narrative modeling. Video-NaRA improves long-range reasoning performance by up to 3 percent, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling complex narrative structures. We will release NA-VQA upon publication.
title Narrative Aligned Long Form Video Question Answering
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19481