Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Zhu, Yuehan, Zhao, Jingqi, Zhao, Jiawen, Mao, Xudong, Zhao, Baoquan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21444
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866917431083008000
author Zhu, Yuehan
Zhao, Jingqi
Zhao, Jiawen
Mao, Xudong
Zhao, Baoquan
author_facet Zhu, Yuehan
Zhao, Jingqi
Zhao, Jiawen
Mao, Xudong
Zhao, Baoquan
contents Long-form video understanding remains fundamentally challenged by pervasive spatiotemporal redundancy and intricate narrative dependencies that span extended temporal horizons. While recent structured representations compress visual information effectively, they frequently sacrifice temporal coherence, which is critical for causal reasoning. Meanwhile, existing multi-agent frameworks operate through rigid, pre-defined workflows that fail to adapt their reasoning strategies to question-specific demands. In this paper, we introduce HiCrew, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that addresses these limitations through three core contributions. First, we propose a Hybrid Tree structure that leverages shot boundary detection to preserve temporal topology while performing relevance-guided hierarchical clustering within semantically coherent segments. Second, we develop a Question-Aware Captioning mechanism that synthesizes intent-driven visual prompts to generate precision-oriented semantic descriptions. Third, we integrate a Planning Layer that dynamically orchestrates agent collaboration by adaptively selecting roles and execution paths based on question complexity. Extensive experiments on EgoSchema and NExT-QA validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating strong performance across diverse question types with particularly pronounced gains in temporal and causal reasoning tasks that benefit from our hierarchical structure-preserving design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_21444
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HiCrew: Hierarchical Reasoning for Long-Form Video Understanding via Question-Aware Multi-Agent Collaboration
Zhu, Yuehan
Zhao, Jingqi
Zhao, Jiawen
Mao, Xudong
Zhao, Baoquan
Artificial Intelligence
Long-form video understanding remains fundamentally challenged by pervasive spatiotemporal redundancy and intricate narrative dependencies that span extended temporal horizons. While recent structured representations compress visual information effectively, they frequently sacrifice temporal coherence, which is critical for causal reasoning. Meanwhile, existing multi-agent frameworks operate through rigid, pre-defined workflows that fail to adapt their reasoning strategies to question-specific demands. In this paper, we introduce HiCrew, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that addresses these limitations through three core contributions. First, we propose a Hybrid Tree structure that leverages shot boundary detection to preserve temporal topology while performing relevance-guided hierarchical clustering within semantically coherent segments. Second, we develop a Question-Aware Captioning mechanism that synthesizes intent-driven visual prompts to generate precision-oriented semantic descriptions. Third, we integrate a Planning Layer that dynamically orchestrates agent collaboration by adaptively selecting roles and execution paths based on question complexity. Extensive experiments on EgoSchema and NExT-QA validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating strong performance across diverse question types with particularly pronounced gains in temporal and causal reasoning tasks that benefit from our hierarchical structure-preserving design.
title HiCrew: Hierarchical Reasoning for Long-Form Video Understanding via Question-Aware Multi-Agent Collaboration
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21444