One Token per Highly Selective Frame: Towards Extreme Compression for Long Video Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhang, Zheyu, Pang, Ziqi, Chen, Shixing, Hao, Xiang, Bhat, Vimal, Wang, Yu-Xiong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Zhang, Zheyu
Pang, Ziqi
Chen, Shixing
Hao, Xiang
Bhat, Vimal
Wang, Yu-Xiong
author_facet Zhang, Zheyu
Pang, Ziqi
Chen, Shixing
Hao, Xiang
Bhat, Vimal
Wang, Yu-Xiong
contents Long video understanding is inherently challenging for vision-language models (VLMs) because of the extensive number of frames. With each video frame typically expanding into tens or hundreds of tokens, the limited context length of large language models (LLMs) forces the VLMs to perceive the frames sparsely and lose temporal information. To address this, we explore extreme video token compression towards one token per frame at the final LLM layer. Our key insight is that heuristic-based compression, widely adopted by previous methods, is prone to information loss, and this necessitates supervising LLM layers into learnable and progressive modules for token-level compression (LP-Comp). Such compression enables our VLM to digest 2x-4x more frames with improved performance. To further increase the token efficiency, we investigate frame-level compression, which selects the frames most relevant to the queries via the internal attention scores of the LLM layers, named question-conditioned compression (QC-Comp). As a notable distinction from previous studies, we mitigate the position bias of LLM attention in long contexts, i.e., the over-concentration on the beginning and end of a sequence, by splitting long videos into short segments and employing local attention. Collectively, our combined token-level and frame-level leads to an extreme compression model for long video understanding, named XComp, achieving a significantly larger compression ratio and enabling denser frame sampling. Our XComp is finetuned from VideoChat-Flash with a data-efficient supervised compression tuning stage that only requires 2.5% of the supervised fine-tuning data, yet boosts the accuracy from 42.9% to 46.2% on LVBench and enhances multiple other long video benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_14149
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle One Token per Highly Selective Frame: Towards Extreme Compression for Long Video Understanding
Zhang, Zheyu
Pang, Ziqi
Chen, Shixing
Hao, Xiang
Bhat, Vimal
Wang, Yu-Xiong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Long video understanding is inherently challenging for vision-language models (VLMs) because of the extensive number of frames. With each video frame typically expanding into tens or hundreds of tokens, the limited context length of large language models (LLMs) forces the VLMs to perceive the frames sparsely and lose temporal information. To address this, we explore extreme video token compression towards one token per frame at the final LLM layer. Our key insight is that heuristic-based compression, widely adopted by previous methods, is prone to information loss, and this necessitates supervising LLM layers into learnable and progressive modules for token-level compression (LP-Comp). Such compression enables our VLM to digest 2x-4x more frames with improved performance. To further increase the token efficiency, we investigate frame-level compression, which selects the frames most relevant to the queries via the internal attention scores of the LLM layers, named question-conditioned compression (QC-Comp). As a notable distinction from previous studies, we mitigate the position bias of LLM attention in long contexts, i.e., the over-concentration on the beginning and end of a sequence, by splitting long videos into short segments and employing local attention. Collectively, our combined token-level and frame-level leads to an extreme compression model for long video understanding, named XComp, achieving a significantly larger compression ratio and enabling denser frame sampling. Our XComp is finetuned from VideoChat-Flash with a data-efficient supervised compression tuning stage that only requires 2.5% of the supervised fine-tuning data, yet boosts the accuracy from 42.9% to 46.2% on LVBench and enhances multiple other long video benchmarks.
title One Token per Highly Selective Frame: Towards Extreme Compression for Long Video Understanding
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14149