VIGiA: Instructional Video Guidance via Dialogue Reasoning and Retrieval

Diogo Glória-Silva, David Semedo, Joao Magalhaes


Abstract
We introduce VIGiA, a novel multimodal dialogue model designed to understand and reason over complex, multi-step instructional video action plans. Unlike prior work which focuses mainly on text-only guidance, or treats vision and language in isolation, VIGiA supports grounded, plan-aware dialogue that requires reasoning over visual inputs, instructional plans, and interleaved user interactions. To this end, VIGiA incorporates two key capabilities: (1) multimodal plan reasoning, enabling the model to align uni- and multimodal queries with the current task plan and respond accurately; and (2) plan-based retrieval, allowing it to retrieve relevant plan steps in either textual or visual representations. Experiments were done on a novel dataset with rich Instructional Video Dialogues aligned with Cooking and DIY plans. Our evaluation shows that VIGiA outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on all tasks in a conversational plan guidance setting, reaching over 90% accuracy on plan-aware VQA.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-eacl.208
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
4003–4030
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.208/
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Cite (ACL):
Diogo Glória-Silva, David Semedo, and Joao Magalhaes. 2026. VIGiA: Instructional Video Guidance via Dialogue Reasoning and Retrieval. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026, pages 4003–4030, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
VIGiA: Instructional Video Guidance via Dialogue Reasoning and Retrieval (Glória-Silva et al., Findings 2026)
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