Too Many Frames, Not All Useful: Efficient Strategies for Long-Form Video QA

Jongwoo Park, Kanchana Ranasinghe, Kumara Kahatapitiya, Wonjeong Ryu, Donghyun Kim, Michael S Ryoo


Abstract
Long-form videos that span across wide temporal intervals are highly information redundant and contain multiple distinct events or entities that are often loosely related. Therefore, when performing long-form video question answering (LVQA), all information necessary to generate a correct response can often be contained within a small subset of frames. Recent literature leverage large language models (LLMs) in LVQA benchmarks, achieving exceptional performance, while relying on vision language models (VLMs) to convert all visual content within videos into natural language. Such VLMs often independently caption a large number of frames uniformly sampled from long videos, which is not efficient and can mostly be redundant. Motivated by this inefficiency, we propose LVNet, a modular and training-free framework featuring a novel Hierarchical Keyframe Selector (HKS) that efficiently selects a minimal set of informative frames tailored to each question. LVNet’s modularity allows easy integration with existing approaches for more efficient LVQA. We achieve state-of-the-art performance among similarly configured models across four benchmark LVQA datasets: EgoSchema, NExT-QA, IntentQA, VideoMME. The code can be found athttps://github.com/jongwoopark7978/LVNet
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-long.164
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3569–3588
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.164/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jongwoo Park, Kanchana Ranasinghe, Kumara Kahatapitiya, Wonjeong Ryu, Donghyun Kim, and Michael S Ryoo. 2026. Too Many Frames, Not All Useful: Efficient Strategies for Long-Form Video QA. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3569–3588, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Too Many Frames, Not All Useful: Efficient Strategies for Long-Form Video QA (Park et al., EACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.164.pdf