@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-videopro,
    title = "{V}ideo{P}ro: Adaptive Program Reasoning for Long Video Understanding",
    author = "Li, Chenglin  and
      Han, Feng  and
      Wang, Yikun  and
      Li, Ruilin  and
      Dong, Shuai  and
      Hou, Haowen  and
      Li, Haitao  and
      Chen, Qianglong  and
      Tao, Feng  and
      Tong, Jingqi  and
      Zhang, Yin  and
      Wang, Jiaqi",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.341/",
    pages = "7497--7513",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Understanding long videos remains challenging due to the sparsity of visual evidence relevant to a given query. Prior work has explored program-based visual grounding, typically relying on executable programs generated by auxiliary large language models. However, when scaling to long videos, existing approaches face several critical limitations: (1) frame-centric vision modules are often insufficient for long video processing; (2) naively applying program-based reasoning to all queries incurs considerable computational overhead; and (3) errors arising from low-confidence predictions and imperfect program execution are difficult to recover from. To address these challenges, we propose VideoPro, a unified framework that enables VideoLLMs to adaptively reason over long videos and refine their predictions through executable programs. VideoPro first performs adaptive reasoning, dynamically determining whether a query can be resolved directly by the native VideoLLM or requires explicit multi-step program reasoning. For complex queries, the model decomposes the task into executable programs that invoke specialized vision modules for precise temporal and semantic grounding. To further improve robustness, VideoPro incorporates a self-refinement mechanism that leverages execution feedback and confidence signals to correct erroneous executions and refine low-confidence reasoning programs. By tightly integrating adaptive reasoning with self-refinement, VideoPro consistently outperforms prior methods across multiple long-video understanding benchmarks, yielding an average 6.7{\%} improvement for Qwen3-VL-8B."
}