Threading Keyframe with Narratives: MLLMs as Strong Long Video Comprehenders

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission16552 Authors

Keywords: Multimodal Large Language Models, Long Video Understanding, Keyframe Selection, Keyframe Narratives

TL;DR: We boost existing MLLMs for training-free long video understanding by introducing a keyframe threading strategy with interleaved narratives.

Abstract: Employing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for long video understanding remains a challenging problem due to the dilemma between the substantial number of video frames (i.e., visual tokens) versus the limited context length of language models. Traditional uniform sampling often leads to selection of irrelevant content, while post-training MLLMs on thousands of frames imposes a substantial computational burden. In this paper, we propose _Narrating KeyFrames Capturing_ (Nar-KFC), a plug-and-play module to facilitate effective and efficient long video perception. Nar-KFC generally involves two collaborative steps. First, we formulate the _keyframe_ selection process as an integer quadratic programming problem, jointly optimizing query-relevance and frame-diversity. To avoid its computational complexity, a customized greedy search strategy is designed as an efficient alternative. Second, to mitigate the temporal discontinuity caused by sparse keyframe sampling, we further introduce interleaved textual _narratives_ generated from non-keyframes using off-the-shelf captioners. These narratives are inserted between keyframes based on their true temporal order, forming a coherent and compact representation. Nar-KFC thus serves as a temporal- and content-aware compression strategy that complements visual and textual modalities. Experimental results on multiple long-video benchmarks demonstrate that Nar-KFC significantly improves the performance of popular MLLMs. Code will be made publicly available.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

Submission Number: 16552