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MarKey addresses the computational bottleneck in long-video understanding for multimodal large language models by introducing a training-free, subset-aware greedy optimization strategy. This approach efficiently selects keyframes that maximize marginal coverage while minimizing redundancy, significantly outperforming existing methods across diverse benchmarks without requiring additional training.
MarKey: Marginal Utility Guided Greedy Keyframe Selection for Long Video Understanding
arXiv:2609.15408v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-video understanding remains challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) because densely encoding long frame sequences is computationally expensive, while uniform sampling under a limited visual budget can miss sparse yet decisive evidence. Recent training-free keyframe selection methods have enabled more efficient inference and yielded promising performance gains. However, many existing methods score frames largely in isolation without explicitly considering how each candidate complements the currently selected subset, potentially resulting in redundant selections and incomplete evidence coverage. To address this limitation, we propose MarKey, a training-free framework that formulates keyframe selection as subset-aware greedy optimization. At each iteration, MarKey scores each candidate using a tractable surrogate that jointly accounts for query relevance, marginal coverage gain, and context-dependent redundancy, and selects the frame with the highest utility. To make this iterative subset-aware evaluation efficient, MarKey uses a compact set of representative anchors to approximate full-video coverage and a bounded window of previously selected frames to limit context-dependent comparisons. Experiments on six benchmarks spanning holistic video understanding, human-centric video understanding, and open-ended video understanding demonstrate that MarKey consistently outperforms existing methods. Further analyses show robust gains across different MLLM backbones, model scales, and frame budgets.
Abstract:Long-video understanding remains challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) because densely encoding long frame sequences is computationally expensive, while uniform sampling under a limited visual budget can miss sparse yet decisive evidence. Recent training-free keyframe selection methods have enabled more efficient inference and yielded promising performance gains. However, many existing methods score frames largely in isolation without explicitly considering how each candidate complements the currently selected subset, potentially resulting in redundant selections and incomplete evidence coverage. To address this limitation, we propose MarKey, a training-free framework that formulates keyframe selection as subset-aware greedy optimization. At each iteration, MarKey scores each candidate using a tractable surrogate that jointly accounts for query relevance, marginal coverage gain, and context-dependent redundancy, and selects the frame with the highest utility. To make this iterative subset-aware evaluation efficient, MarKey uses a compact set of representative anchors to approximate full-video coverage and a bounded window of previously selected frames to limit context-dependent comparisons. Experiments on six benchmarks spanning holistic video understanding, human-centric video understanding, and open-ended video understanding demonstrate that MarKey consistently outperforms existing methods. Further analyses show robust gains across different MLLM backbones, model scales, and frame budgets.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2609.15408 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2609.15408v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.15408 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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