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Dec 25

ACE-RL: Adaptive Constraint-Enhanced Reward for Long-form Generation Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in long-context understanding, yet they face significant challenges in high-quality long-form generation. Existing studies primarily suffer from two limitations: (1) A heavy reliance on scarce, high-quality long-form response data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or for pairwise preference reward in reinforcement learning (RL). (2) Focus on coarse-grained quality optimization dimensions, such as relevance, coherence, and helpfulness, overlooking the fine-grained specifics inherent to diverse long-form generation scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a framework using Adaptive Constraint-Enhanced reward for long-form generation Reinforcement Learning (ACE-RL). ACE-RL first automatically deconstructs each instruction into a set of fine-grained, adaptive constraint criteria by identifying its underlying intents and demands. Subsequently, we design a reward mechanism that quantifies the quality of long-form responses based on their satisfaction over corresponding constraints, converting subjective quality evaluation into constraint verification. Finally, we utilize reinforcement learning to guide models toward superior long-form generation capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that our ACE-RL framework significantly outperforms existing SFT and RL baselines by 20.70% and 7.32% on WritingBench, and our top-performing model even surpasses proprietary systems like GPT-4o by 7.10%, providing a more effective training paradigm for LLMs to generate high-quality content across diverse long-form generation scenarios.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 5

Augmenting Language Models with Long-Term Memory

Existing large language models (LLMs) can only afford fix-sized inputs due to the input length limit, preventing them from utilizing rich long-context information from past inputs. To address this, we propose a framework, Language Models Augmented with Long-Term Memory (LongMem), which enables LLMs to memorize long history. We design a novel decoupled network architecture with the original backbone LLM frozen as a memory encoder and an adaptive residual side-network as a memory retriever and reader. Such a decoupled memory design can easily cache and update long-term past contexts for memory retrieval without suffering from memory staleness. Enhanced with memory-augmented adaptation training, LongMem can thus memorize long past context and use long-term memory for language modeling. The proposed memory retrieval module can handle unlimited-length context in its memory bank to benefit various downstream tasks. Typically, LongMem can enlarge the long-form memory to 65k tokens and thus cache many-shot extra demonstration examples as long-form memory for in-context learning. Experiments show that our method outperforms strong long-context models on ChapterBreak, a challenging long-context modeling benchmark, and achieves remarkable improvements on memory-augmented in-context learning over LLMs. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in helping language models to memorize and utilize long-form contents. Our code is open-sourced at https://aka.ms/LongMem.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 12, 2023 5

Hogwild! Inference: Parallel LLM Generation via Concurrent Attention

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to tackle increasingly complex tasks through advanced reasoning, long-form content generation, and tool use. Solving these tasks often involves long inference-time computations. In human problem solving, a common strategy to expedite work is collaboration: by dividing the problem into sub-tasks, exploring different strategies concurrently, etc. Recent research has shown that LLMs can also operate in parallel by implementing explicit cooperation frameworks, such as voting mechanisms or the explicit creation of independent sub-tasks that can be executed in parallel. However, each of these frameworks may not be suitable for all types of tasks, which can hinder their applicability. In this work, we propose a different design approach: we run LLM "workers" in parallel , allowing them to synchronize via a concurrently-updated attention cache and prompt these workers to decide how best to collaborate. Our approach allows the instances to come up with their own collaboration strategy for the problem at hand, all the while "seeing" each other's partial progress in the concurrent cache. We implement this approach via Hogwild! Inference: a parallel LLM inference engine where multiple instances of the same LLM run in parallel with the same attention cache, with "instant" access to each other's generated tokens. Hogwild! inference takes advantage of Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) to avoid recomputation while improving parallel hardware utilization. We find that modern reasoning-capable LLMs can perform inference with shared Key-Value cache out of the box, without additional fine-tuning.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 8 6

The Future of AI: Exploring the Potential of Large Concept Models

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to drive transformative innovations, with significant progress in conversational interfaces, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent content creation. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the rise of Generative AI has marked a pivotal era, with the term Large Language Models (LLMs) becoming a ubiquitous part of daily life. LLMs have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in tasks such as text summarization, code generation, and creative writing. However, these models are inherently limited by their token-level processing, which restricts their ability to perform abstract reasoning, conceptual understanding, and efficient generation of long-form content. To address these limitations, Meta has introduced Large Concept Models (LCMs), representing a significant shift from traditional token-based frameworks. LCMs use concepts as foundational units of understanding, enabling more sophisticated semantic reasoning and context-aware decision-making. Given the limited academic research on this emerging technology, our study aims to bridge the knowledge gap by collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing existing grey literature to provide a comprehensive understanding of LCMs. Specifically, we (i) identify and describe the features that distinguish LCMs from LLMs, (ii) explore potential applications of LCMs across multiple domains, and (iii) propose future research directions and practical strategies to advance LCM development and adoption.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 8

InfiniBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Large Multimodal Models in Very Long Video Understanding

Understanding long videos, ranging from tens of minutes to several hours, presents unique challenges in video comprehension. Despite the increasing importance of long-form video content, existing benchmarks primarily focus on shorter clips. To address this gap, we introduce InfiniBench a comprehensive benchmark for very long video understanding which presents 1)The longest video duration, averaging 76.34 minutes; 2) The largest number of question-answer pairs, 108.2K; 3) Diversity in questions that examine nine different skills and include both multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions; 4) Humancentric, as the video sources come from movies and daily TV shows, with specific human-level question designs such as Movie Spoiler Questions that require critical thinking and comprehensive understanding. Using InfiniBench, we comprehensively evaluate existing Large MultiModality Models (LMMs) on each skill, including the commercial model Gemini 1.5 Flash and the open-source models. The evaluation shows significant challenges in our benchmark.Our results show that the best AI models such Gemini struggles to perform well with 42.72% average accuracy and 2.71 out of 5 average score. We hope this benchmark will stimulate the LMMs community towards long video and human-level understanding. Our benchmark can be accessed at https://vision-cair.github.io/InfiniBench/

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 28, 2024

Movie Facts and Fibs (MF$^2$): A Benchmark for Long Movie Understanding

Despite recent progress in vision-language models (VLMs), holistic understanding of long-form video content remains a significant challenge, partly due to limitations in current benchmarks. Many focus on peripheral, ``needle-in-a-haystack'' details, encouraging context-insensitive retrieval over deep comprehension. Others rely on large-scale, semi-automatically generated questions (often produced by language models themselves) that are easier for models to answer but fail to reflect genuine understanding. In this paper, we introduce MF^2, a new benchmark for evaluating whether models can comprehend, consolidate, and recall key narrative information from full-length movies (50-170 minutes long). MF^2 includes over 50 full-length, open-licensed movies, each paired with manually constructed sets of claim pairs -- one true (fact) and one plausible but false (fib), totalling over 850 pairs. These claims target core narrative elements such as character motivations and emotions, causal chains, and event order, and refer to memorable moments that humans can recall without rewatching the movie. Instead of multiple-choice formats, we adopt a binary claim evaluation protocol: for each pair, models must correctly identify both the true and false claims. This reduces biases like answer ordering and enables a more precise assessment of reasoning. Our experiments demonstrate that both open-weight and closed state-of-the-art models fall well short of human performance, underscoring the relative ease of the task for humans and their superior ability to retain and reason over critical narrative information -- an ability current VLMs lack.

  • 31 authors
·
Jun 6

ViLLA-MMBench: A Unified Benchmark Suite for LLM-Augmented Multimodal Movie Recommendation

Recommending long-form video content demands joint modeling of visual, audio, and textual modalities, yet most benchmarks address only raw features or narrow fusion. We present ViLLA-MMBench, a reproducible, extensible benchmark for LLM-augmented multimodal movie recommendation. Built on MovieLens and MMTF-14K, it aligns dense item embeddings from three modalities: audio (block-level, i-vector), visual (CNN, AVF), and text. Missing or sparse metadata is automatically enriched using state-of-the-art LLMs (e.g., OpenAI Ada), generating high-quality synopses for thousands of movies. All text (raw or augmented) is embedded with configurable encoders (Ada, LLaMA-2, Sentence-T5), producing multiple ready-to-use sets. The pipeline supports interchangeable early-, mid-, and late-fusion (concatenation, PCA, CCA, rank-aggregation) and multiple backbones (MF, VAECF, VBPR, AMR, VMF) for ablation. Experiments are fully declarative via a single YAML file. Evaluation spans accuracy (Recall, nDCG) and beyond-accuracy metrics: cold-start rate, coverage, novelty, diversity, fairness. Results show LLM-based augmentation and strong text embeddings boost cold-start and coverage, especially when fused with audio-visual features. Systematic benchmarking reveals universal versus backbone- or metric-specific combinations. Open-source code, embeddings, and configs enable reproducible, fair multimodal RS research and advance principled generative AI integration in large-scale recommendation. Code: https://recsys-lab.github.io/ViLLA-MMBench

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 6

Mixed-R1: Unified Reward Perspective For Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models

Recent works on large language models (LLMs) have successfully demonstrated the emergence of reasoning capabilities via reinforcement learning (RL). Although recent efforts leverage group relative policy optimization (GRPO) for MLLMs post-training, they constantly explore one specific aspect, such as grounding tasks, math problems, or chart analysis. There are no works that can leverage multi-source MLLM tasks for stable reinforcement learning. In this work, we present a unified perspective to solve this problem. We present Mixed-R1, a unified yet straightforward framework that contains a mixed reward function design (Mixed-Reward) and a mixed post-training dataset (Mixed-45K). We first design a data engine to select high-quality examples to build the Mixed-45K post-training dataset. Then, we present a Mixed-Reward design, which contains various reward functions for various MLLM tasks. In particular, it has four different reward functions: matching reward for binary answer or multiple-choice problems, chart reward for chart-aware datasets, IoU reward for grounding problems, and open-ended reward for long-form text responses such as caption datasets. To handle the various long-form text content, we propose a new open-ended reward named Bidirectional Max-Average Similarity (BMAS) by leveraging tokenizer embedding matching between the generated response and the ground truth. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed method on various MLLMs, including Qwen2.5-VL and Intern-VL on various sizes. Our dataset and model are available at https://github.com/xushilin1/mixed-r1.

ByteDance ByteDance
·
May 29

Cinéaste: A Fine-grained Contextual Movie Question Answering Benchmark

While recent advancements in vision-language models have improved video understanding, diagnosing their capacity for deep, narrative comprehension remains a challenge. Existing benchmarks often test short-clip recognition or use template-based questions, leaving a critical gap in evaluating fine-grained reasoning over long-form narrative content. To address these gaps, we introduce Cinacute{easte}, a comprehensive benchmark for long-form movie understanding. Our dataset comprises 3,119 multiple-choice question-answer pairs derived from 1,805 scenes across 200 diverse movies, spanning five novel fine-grained contextual reasoning categories. We use GPT-4o to generate diverse, context-rich questions by integrating visual descriptions, captions, scene titles, and summaries, which require deep narrative understanding. To ensure high-quality evaluation, our pipeline incorporates a two-stage filtering process: Context-Independence filtering ensures questions require video context, while Contextual Veracity filtering validates factual consistency against the movie content, mitigating hallucinations. Experiments show that existing MLLMs struggle on Cinacute{easte}; our analysis reveals that long-range temporal reasoning is a primary bottleneck, with the top open-source model achieving only 63.15\% accuracy. This underscores significant challenges in fine-grained contextual understanding and the need for advancements in long-form movie comprehension.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 17

PODTILE: Facilitating Podcast Episode Browsing with Auto-generated Chapters

Listeners of long-form talk-audio content, such as podcast episodes, often find it challenging to understand the overall structure and locate relevant sections. A practical solution is to divide episodes into chapters--semantically coherent segments labeled with titles and timestamps. Since most episodes on our platform at Spotify currently lack creator-provided chapters, automating the creation of chapters is essential. Scaling the chapterization of podcast episodes presents unique challenges. First, episodes tend to be less structured than written texts, featuring spontaneous discussions with nuanced transitions. Second, the transcripts are usually lengthy, averaging about 16,000 tokens, which necessitates efficient processing that can preserve context. To address these challenges, we introduce PODTILE, a fine-tuned encoder-decoder transformer to segment conversational data. The model simultaneously generates chapter transitions and titles for the input transcript. To preserve context, each input text is augmented with global context, including the episode's title, description, and previous chapter titles. In our intrinsic evaluation, PODTILE achieved an 11% improvement in ROUGE score over the strongest baseline. Additionally, we provide insights into the practical benefits of auto-generated chapters for listeners navigating episode content. Our findings indicate that auto-generated chapters serve as a useful tool for engaging with less popular podcasts. Finally, we present empirical evidence that using chapter titles can enhance effectiveness of sparse retrieval in search tasks.

  • 17 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024

Long-form factuality in large language models

Large language models (LLMs) often generate content that contains factual errors when responding to fact-seeking prompts on open-ended topics. To benchmark a model's long-form factuality in open domains, we first use GPT-4 to generate LongFact, a prompt set comprising thousands of questions spanning 38 topics. We then propose that LLM agents can be used as automated evaluators for long-form factuality through a method which we call Search-Augmented Factuality Evaluator (SAFE). SAFE utilizes an LLM to break down a long-form response into a set of individual facts and to evaluate the accuracy of each fact using a multi-step reasoning process comprising sending search queries to Google Search and determining whether a fact is supported by the search results. Furthermore, we propose extending F1 score as an aggregated metric for long-form factuality. To do so, we balance the percentage of supported facts in a response (precision) with the percentage of provided facts relative to a hyperparameter representing a user's preferred response length (recall). Empirically, we demonstrate that LLM agents can achieve superhuman rating performance - on a set of ~16k individual facts, SAFE agrees with crowdsourced human annotators 72% of the time, and on a random subset of 100 disagreement cases, SAFE wins 76% of the time. At the same time, SAFE is more than 20 times cheaper than human annotators. We also benchmark thirteen language models on LongFact across four model families (Gemini, GPT, Claude, and PaLM-2), finding that larger language models generally achieve better long-form factuality. LongFact, SAFE, and all experimental code are available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/long-form-factuality.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 27, 2024 2

TimeSearch-R: Adaptive Temporal Search for Long-Form Video Understanding via Self-Verification Reinforcement Learning

Temporal search aims to identify a minimal set of relevant frames from tens of thousands based on a given query, serving as a foundation for accurate long-form video understanding. Existing works attempt to progressively narrow the search space. However, these approaches typically rely on a hand-crafted search process, lacking end-to-end optimization for learning optimal search strategies. In this paper, we propose TimeSearch-R, which reformulates temporal search as interleaved text-video thinking, seamlessly integrating searching video clips into the reasoning process through reinforcement learning (RL). However, applying RL training methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), to video reasoning can result in unsupervised intermediate search decisions. This leads to insufficient exploration of the video content and inconsistent logical reasoning. To address these issues, we introduce GRPO with Completeness Self-Verification (GRPO-CSV), which gathers searched video frames from the interleaved reasoning process and utilizes the same policy model to verify the adequacy of searched frames, thereby improving the completeness of video reasoning. Additionally, we construct datasets specifically designed for the SFT cold-start and RL training of GRPO-CSV, filtering out samples with weak temporal dependencies to enhance task difficulty and improve temporal search capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TimeSearch-R achieves significant improvements on temporal search benchmarks such as Haystack-LVBench and Haystack-Ego4D, as well as long-form video understanding benchmarks like VideoMME and MLVU. Notably, TimeSearch-R establishes a new state-of-the-art on LongVideoBench with 4.1% improvement over the base model Qwen2.5-VL and 2.0% over the advanced video reasoning model Video-R1. Our code is available at https://github.com/Time-Search/TimeSearch-R.

ByteDance ByteDance
·
Nov 7 2

LCFO: Long Context and Long Form Output Dataset and Benchmarking

This paper presents the Long Context and Form Output (LCFO) benchmark, a novel evaluation framework for assessing gradual summarization and summary expansion capabilities across diverse domains. LCFO consists of long input documents (5k words average length), each of which comes with three summaries of different lengths (20%, 10%, and 5% of the input text), as well as approximately 15 questions and answers (QA) related to the input content. Notably, LCFO also provides alignments between specific QA pairs and corresponding summaries in 7 domains. The primary motivation behind providing summaries of different lengths is to establish a controllable framework for generating long texts from shorter inputs, i.e. summary expansion. To establish an evaluation metric framework for summarization and summary expansion, we provide human evaluation scores for human-generated outputs, as well as results from various state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). GPT-4o-mini achieves best human scores among automatic systems in both summarization and summary expansion tasks (~ +10% and +20%, respectively). It even surpasses human output quality in the case of short summaries (~ +7%). Overall automatic metrics achieve low correlations with human evaluation scores (~ 0.4) but moderate correlation on specific evaluation aspects such as fluency and attribution (~ 0.6). The LCFO benchmark offers a standardized platform for evaluating summarization and summary expansion performance, as well as corresponding automatic metrics, thereby providing an important evaluation framework to advance generative AI.

  • 13 authors
·
Dec 11, 2024

SALOVA: Segment-Augmented Long Video Assistant for Targeted Retrieval and Routing in Long-Form Video Analysis

Despite advances in Large Multi-modal Models, applying them to long and untrimmed video content remains challenging due to limitations in context length and substantial memory overhead. These constraints often lead to significant information loss and reduced relevance in the model responses. With the exponential growth of video data across web platforms, understanding long-form video is crucial for advancing generalized intelligence. In this paper, we introduce SALOVA: Segment-Augmented LOng Video Assistant, a novel video-LLM framework designed to enhance the comprehension of lengthy video content through targeted retrieval process. We address two main challenges to achieve it: (i) We present the SceneWalk dataset, a high-quality collection of 87.8K long videos, each densely captioned at the segment level to enable models to capture scene continuity and maintain rich descriptive context. (ii) We develop robust architectural designs integrating dynamic routing mechanism and spatio-temporal projector to efficiently retrieve and process relevant video segments based on user queries. Our framework mitigates the limitations of current video-LMMs by allowing for precise identification and retrieval of relevant video segments in response to queries, thereby improving the contextual relevance of the generated responses. Through extensive experiments, SALOVA demonstrates enhanced capability in processing complex long-form videos, showing significant capability to maintain contextual integrity across extended sequences.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 25, 2024 2

ExpertLongBench: Benchmarking Language Models on Expert-Level Long-Form Generation Tasks with Structured Checklists

This paper introduces ExpertLongBench, an expert-level benchmark containing 11 tasks from 9 domains that reflect realistic expert workflows and applications. Beyond question answering, the application-driven tasks in ExpertLongBench demand long-form outputs that can exceed 5,000 tokens and strict adherence to domain-specific requirements. Notably, each task in ExpertLongBench includes a rubric, designed or validated by domain experts, to specify task requirements and guide output evaluation. Furthermore, we propose CLEAR, an evaluation framework that supports accurate evaluation of long-form model outputs in our benchmark. To achieve fine-grained, expert-aligned evaluation, CLEAR derives checklists from both model outputs and references by extracting information corresponding to items in the task-specific rubric. Checklist items for model outputs are then compared with corresponding items for reference outputs to assess their correctness, enabling grounded evaluation. We benchmark 11 large language models (LLMs) and analyze components in CLEAR, showing that (1) existing LLMs, with the top performer achieving only a 26.8% F1 score, require significant improvement for expert-level tasks; (2) models can generate content corresponding to the required aspects, though often not accurately; and (3) accurate checklist extraction and comparison in CLEAR can be achieved by open-weight models for more scalable and low-cost usage.

VisuCraft: Enhancing Large Vision-Language Models for Complex Visual-Guided Creative Content Generation via Structured Information Extraction

This paper introduces VisuCraft, a novel framework designed to significantly enhance the capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in complex visual-guided creative content generation. Existing LVLMs often exhibit limitations in maintaining high visual fidelity, genuine creativity, and precise adherence to nuanced user instructions when generating long-form texts. VisuCraft addresses these challenges by integrating a multimodal structured information extractor (E) and a dynamic prompt generation module (G). The extractor distills fine-grained visual attributes from input images into a rich, structured representation, which the dynamic prompt module then combines with user instructions to create highly optimized prompts for underlying LVLMs (e.g., LLaVA, InstructBLIP). Evaluated on the self-constructed ImageStoryGen-500K dataset using VisuGen Metrics (Visual Grounding, Creativity, and Instruction Adherence), VisuCraft consistently outperforms baseline LVLMs across tasks like story generation and poetry composition. Our results demonstrate remarkable improvements, particularly in creativity and instruction adherence, validating VisuCraft's effectiveness in producing imaginative, visually grounded, and user-aligned long-form creative text. This work unlocks new potential for LVLMs in sophisticated creative AI applications.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 4

LAQuer: Localized Attribution Queries in Content-grounded Generation

Grounded text generation models often produce content that deviates from their source material, requiring user verification to ensure accuracy. Existing attribution methods associate entire sentences with source documents, which can be overwhelming for users seeking to fact-check specific claims. In contrast, existing sub-sentence attribution methods may be more precise but fail to align with users' interests. In light of these limitations, we introduce Localized Attribution Queries (LAQuer), a new task that localizes selected spans of generated output to their corresponding source spans, allowing fine-grained and user-directed attribution. We compare two approaches for the LAQuer task, including prompting large language models (LLMs) and leveraging LLM internal representations. We then explore a modeling framework that extends existing attributed text generation methods to LAQuer. We evaluate this framework across two grounded text generation tasks: Multi-document Summarization (MDS) and Long-form Question Answering (LFQA). Our findings show that LAQuer methods significantly reduce the length of the attributed text. Our contributions include: (1) proposing the LAQuer task to enhance attribution usability, (2) suggesting a modeling framework and benchmarking multiple baselines, and (3) proposing a new evaluation setting to promote future research on localized attribution in content-grounded generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 1

X-Actor: Emotional and Expressive Long-Range Portrait Acting from Audio

We present X-Actor, a novel audio-driven portrait animation framework that generates lifelike, emotionally expressive talking head videos from a single reference image and an input audio clip. Unlike prior methods that emphasize lip synchronization and short-range visual fidelity in constrained speaking scenarios, X-Actor enables actor-quality, long-form portrait performance capturing nuanced, dynamically evolving emotions that flow coherently with the rhythm and content of speech. Central to our approach is a two-stage decoupled generation pipeline: an audio-conditioned autoregressive diffusion model that predicts expressive yet identity-agnostic facial motion latent tokens within a long temporal context window, followed by a diffusion-based video synthesis module that translates these motions into high-fidelity video animations. By operating in a compact facial motion latent space decoupled from visual and identity cues, our autoregressive diffusion model effectively captures long-range correlations between audio and facial dynamics through a diffusion-forcing training paradigm, enabling infinite-length emotionally-rich motion prediction without error accumulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-Actor produces compelling, cinematic-style performances that go beyond standard talking head animations and achieves state-of-the-art results in long-range, audio-driven emotional portrait acting.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 4

An Efficient Rubric-based Generative Verifier for Search-Augmented LLMs

Search augmentation empowers Large Language Models with retrieval capabilities to overcome the limitations imposed by static parameters. Recently, Reinforcement Learning leverages tailored reward signals as a viable technique to enhance LLMs performing tasks involving search. However, existing reward modeling for search-augmented LLMs faces several limitations. Rule-based rewards, such as Exact Match, are verifiable but fragile to variations in expression and cannot be applied to long-form workloads. In contrast, generative rewards improve robustness, but designing verifiable and stable rewards for long-form workloads in dynamic corpora remains challenging and also incurs high computational costs. In this paper, we propose a unified and verifiable paradigm, "nugget-as-rubric", which treats atomic information points as structured evaluation criteria for different search-augmentation workloads. Short-form tasks correspond to a single rubric, whereas long-form tasks expand to multiple rubrics aligned with the question's information needs. To support long-form settings, we design an automatic rubric construction pipeline based on query rewriting, which can automatically retrieve passages relevant to each question and extract rubrics from them, both from static corpora and from dynamic online web content. Furthermore, we introduce Search-Gen-V, a 4B-parameter efficient generative verifier under our proposed verifiable paradigm, which is trained via the idea of distillation and a two-stage strategy. Experimental results show that Search-Gen-V achieves strong verification accuracy across different workloads, making it a scalable, robust, and efficient verifiable reward constructor for search-augmented LLMs.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 16

LiveResearchBench: A Live Benchmark for User-Centric Deep Research in the Wild

Deep research -- producing comprehensive, citation-grounded reports by searching and synthesizing information from hundreds of live web sources -- marks an important frontier for agentic systems. To rigorously evaluate this ability, four principles are essential: tasks should be (1) user-centric, reflecting realistic information needs, (2) dynamic, requiring up-to-date information beyond parametric knowledge, (3) unambiguous, ensuring consistent interpretation across users, and (4) multi-faceted and search-intensive, requiring search over numerous web sources and in-depth analysis. Existing benchmarks fall short of these principles, often focusing on narrow domains or posing ambiguous questions that hinder fair comparison. Guided by these principles, we introduce LiveResearchBench, a benchmark of 100 expert-curated tasks spanning daily life, enterprise, and academia, each requiring extensive, dynamic, real-time web search and synthesis. Built with over 1,500 hours of human labor, LiveResearchBench provides a rigorous basis for systematic evaluation. To evaluate citation-grounded long-form reports, we introduce DeepEval, a comprehensive suite covering both content- and report-level quality, including coverage, presentation, citation accuracy and association, consistency and depth of analysis. DeepEval integrates four complementary evaluation protocols, each designed to ensure stable assessment and high agreement with human judgments. Using LiveResearchBench and DeepEval, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 17 frontier deep research systems, including single-agent web search, single-agent deep research, and multi-agent systems. Our analysis reveals current strengths, recurring failure modes, and key system components needed to advance reliable, insightful deep research.

Salesforce Salesforce
·
Oct 15 3

AVATAAR: Agentic Video Answering via Temporal Adaptive Alignment and Reasoning

With the increasing prevalence of video content, effectively understanding and answering questions about long form videos has become essential for numerous applications. Although large vision language models (LVLMs) have enhanced performance, they often face challenges with nuanced queries that demand both a comprehensive understanding and detailed analysis. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce AVATAAR, a modular and interpretable framework that combines global and local video context, along with a Pre Retrieval Thinking Agent and a Rethink Module. AVATAAR creates a persistent global summary and establishes a feedback loop between the Rethink Module and the Pre Retrieval Thinking Agent, allowing the system to refine its retrieval strategies based on partial answers and replicate human-like iterative reasoning. On the CinePile benchmark, AVATAAR demonstrates significant improvements over a baseline, achieving relative gains of +5.6% in temporal reasoning, +5% in technical queries, +8% in theme-based questions, and +8.2% in narrative comprehension. Our experiments confirm that each module contributes positively to the overall performance, with the feedback loop being crucial for adaptability. These findings highlight AVATAAR's effectiveness in enhancing video understanding capabilities. Ultimately, AVATAAR presents a scalable solution for long-form Video Question Answering (QA), merging accuracy, interpretability, and extensibility.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 19

RecurrentGPT: Interactive Generation of (Arbitrarily) Long Text

The fixed-size context of Transformer makes GPT models incapable of generating arbitrarily long text. In this paper, we introduce RecurrentGPT, a language-based simulacrum of the recurrence mechanism in RNNs. RecurrentGPT is built upon a large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT and uses natural language to simulate the Long Short-Term Memory mechanism in an LSTM. At each timestep, RecurrentGPT generates a paragraph of text and updates its language-based long-short term memory stored on the hard drive and the prompt, respectively. This recurrence mechanism enables RecurrentGPT to generate texts of arbitrary length without forgetting. Since human users can easily observe and edit the natural language memories, RecurrentGPT is interpretable and enables interactive generation of long text. RecurrentGPT is an initial step towards next-generation computer-assisted writing systems beyond local editing suggestions. In addition to producing AI-generated content (AIGC), we also demonstrate the possibility of using RecurrentGPT as an interactive fiction that directly interacts with consumers. We call this usage of generative models by ``AI As Contents'' (AIAC), which we believe is the next form of conventional AIGC. We further demonstrate the possibility of using RecurrentGPT to create personalized interactive fiction that directly interacts with readers instead of interacting with writers. More broadly, RecurrentGPT demonstrates the utility of borrowing ideas from popular model designs in cognitive science and deep learning for prompting LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/aiwaves-cn/RecurrentGPT and an online demo is available at https://www.aiwaves.org/recurrentgpt.

  • 8 authors
·
May 22, 2023 2

CoLLAP: Contrastive Long-form Language-Audio Pretraining with Musical Temporal Structure Augmentation

Modeling temporal characteristics plays a significant role in the representation learning of audio waveform. We propose Contrastive Long-form Language-Audio Pretraining (CoLLAP) to significantly extend the perception window for both the input audio (up to 5 minutes) and the language descriptions (exceeding 250 words), while enabling contrastive learning across modalities and temporal dynamics. Leveraging recent Music-LLMs to generate long-form music captions for full-length songs, augmented with musical temporal structures, we collect 51.3K audio-text pairs derived from the large-scale AudioSet training dataset, where the average audio length reaches 288 seconds. We propose a novel contrastive learning architecture that fuses language representations with structured audio representations by segmenting each song into clips and extracting their embeddings. With an attention mechanism, we capture multimodal temporal correlations, allowing the model to automatically weigh and enhance the final fusion score for improved contrastive alignment. Finally, we develop two variants of the CoLLAP model with different types of backbone language models. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple long-form music-text retrieval datasets, we demonstrate consistent performance improvement in retrieval accuracy compared with baselines. We also show the pretrained CoLLAP models can be transferred to various music information retrieval tasks, with heterogeneous long-form multimodal contexts.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024

A Vision-Language Foundation Model for Leaf Disease Identification

Leaf disease identification plays a pivotal role in smart agriculture. However, many existing studies still struggle to integrate image and textual modalities to compensate for each other's limitations. Furthermore, many of these approaches rely on pretraining with constrained datasets such as ImageNet, which lack domain-specific information. We propose SCOLD (Soft-target COntrastive learning for Leaf Disease identification), a context-aware vision-language foundation model tailored to address these challenges for agricultural tasks. SCOLD is developed using a diverse corpus of plant leaf images and corresponding symptom descriptions, comprising over 186,000 image-caption pairs aligned with 97 unique concepts. Through task-agnostic pretraining, SCOLD leverages contextual soft targets to mitigate overconfidence in contrastive learning by smoothing labels, thereby improving model generalization and robustness on fine-grained classification tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that SCOLD outperforms existing vision-language models such as OpenAI-CLIP-L, BioCLIP, and SigLIP2 across several benchmarks, including zero-shot and few-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and image classification, while maintaining a competitive parameter footprint. Ablation studies further highlight SCOLD's effectiveness in contrast to its counterparts. The proposed approach significantly advances the agricultural vision-language foundation model, offering strong performance with minimal or no supervised fine-tuning. This work lays a solid groundwork for future research on models trained with long-form and simplified contexts, tasks involving class ambiguity, and multi-modal systems for intelligent plant disease diagnostics. The code for this study is available at https://huggingface.co/enalis/scold

  • 3 authors
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May 11

Deep Video Discovery: Agentic Search with Tool Use for Long-form Video Understanding

Long-form video understanding presents significant challenges due to extensive temporal-spatial complexity and the difficulty of question answering under such extended contexts. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable advancements in video analysis capabilities and long context handling, they continue to exhibit limitations when processing information-dense hour-long videos. To overcome such limitations, we propose the Deep Video Discovery agent to leverage an agentic search strategy over segmented video clips. Different from previous video agents manually designing a rigid workflow, our approach emphasizes the autonomous nature of agents. By providing a set of search-centric tools on multi-granular video database, our DVD agent leverages the advanced reasoning capability of LLM to plan on its current observation state, strategically selects tools, formulates appropriate parameters for actions, and iteratively refines its internal reasoning in light of the gathered information. We perform comprehensive evaluation on multiple long video understanding benchmarks that demonstrates the advantage of the entire system design. Our DVD agent achieves SOTA performance, significantly surpassing prior works by a large margin on the challenging LVBench dataset. Comprehensive ablation studies and in-depth tool analyses are also provided, yielding insights to further advance intelligent agents tailored for long-form video understanding tasks. The code will be released later.

  • 7 authors
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May 23 2

Spinning the Golden Thread: Benchmarking Long-Form Generation in Language Models

The abilities of long-context language models (LMs) are often evaluated using the "Needle-in-a-Haystack" (NIAH) test, which comprises tasks designed to assess a model's ability to identify specific information ("needle") within large text sequences ("haystack"). While these benchmarks measure how well models understand long-context input sequences, they do not effectively gauge the quality of long-form text generation--a critical aspect for applications such as design proposals and creative writing. To address this gap, we have introduced a new long-form text evaluation benchmark, Spinning the Golden Thread (SGT), which tests models' ability to identify specific events within generated long text sequences. In this benchmark, we prompt long-context LMs to create long-form text that must include particular events or constraints and evaluate their ability to incorporate these elements. We evaluated ten long-context LMs across four distinct scenarios, three types of prompt instructions, and two different generation-length settings (16K and 32K). Although these models perform well on NIAH benchmarks, none demonstrated satisfactory performance on the Spinning the Golden Thread, raising concerns about their ability to generate coherent long-form text that follows instructions. Additionally, as the length of the generated text increases, all models exhibit a significant drop in performance.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 3, 2024 3

LongProc: Benchmarking Long-Context Language Models on Long Procedural Generation

Existing benchmarks for evaluating long-context language models (LCLMs) primarily focus on long-context recall, requiring models to produce short responses based on a few critical snippets while processing thousands of irrelevant tokens. We introduce LongProc (Long Procedural Generation), a new benchmark that requires both the integration of highly dispersed information and long-form generation. LongProc consists of six diverse procedural generation tasks, such as extracting structured information from HTML pages into a TSV format and executing complex search procedures to create travel plans. These tasks challenge LCLMs by testing their ability to follow detailed procedural instructions, synthesize and reason over dispersed information, and generate structured, long-form outputs (up to 8K tokens). Furthermore, as these tasks adhere to deterministic procedures and yield structured outputs, they enable reliable rule-based evaluation. We evaluate 17 LCLMs on LongProc across three difficulty levels, with maximum numbers of output tokens set at 500, 2K, and 8K. Notably, while all tested models claim a context window size above 32K tokens, open-weight models typically falter on 2K-token tasks, and closed-source models like GPT-4o show significant degradation on 8K-token tasks. Further analysis reveals that LCLMs struggle to maintain long-range coherence in long-form generations. These findings highlight critical limitations in current LCLMs and suggest substantial room for improvement. Data and code available at: https://princeton-pli.github.io/LongProc

  • 8 authors
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Jan 9

TSPO: Temporal Sampling Policy Optimization for Long-form Video Language Understanding

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in vision-language tasks, yet they still face challenges when processing long-duration video inputs. The limitation arises from MLLMs' context limit and training costs, necessitating sparse frame sampling before feeding videos into MLLMs. Existing video MLLMs adopt training-free uniform sampling or keyframe search, which may miss critical events or be constrained by the pre-trained models' event understanding capabilities. Meanwhile, building a training-based method remains challenging due to the unsupervised and non-differentiable nature of sparse frame sampling. To address these problems, we propose Temporal Sampling Policy Optimization (TSPO), advancing MLLMs' long-form video-language understanding via reinforcement learning. Specifically, we first propose a trainable event-aware temporal agent, which captures event-query correlation for performing probabilistic keyframe selection. Then, we propose the TSPO reinforcement learning paradigm, which models keyframe selection and language generation as a joint decision-making process, enabling end-to-end group relative optimization with efficient rule-based rewards. Furthermore, for the TSPO's training, we propose a long video training data construction pipeline with comprehensive temporal data and video Needle-in-a-Haystack data. Finally, we incorporate rule-based answering accuracy and temporal locating reward mechanisms to optimize the temporal sampling policy. Comprehensive experiments show that our TSPO achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple long video understanding benchmarks, and shows transferable ability across different cutting-edge Video-MLLMs.

  • 9 authors
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Aug 6

VideoLLaMB: Long-context Video Understanding with Recurrent Memory Bridges

Recent advancements in large-scale video-language models have shown significant potential for real-time planning and detailed interactions. However, their high computational demands and the scarcity of annotated datasets limit their practicality for academic researchers. In this work, we introduce VideoLLaMB, a novel framework that utilizes temporal memory tokens within bridge layers to allow for the encoding of entire video sequences alongside historical visual data, effectively preserving semantic continuity and enhancing model performance across various tasks. This approach includes recurrent memory tokens and a SceneTilling algorithm, which segments videos into independent semantic units to preserve semantic integrity. Empirically, VideoLLaMB significantly outstrips existing video-language models, demonstrating a 5.5 points improvement over its competitors across three VideoQA benchmarks, and 2.06 points on egocentric planning. Comprehensive results on the MVBench show that VideoLLaMB-7B achieves markedly better results than previous 7B models of same LLM. Remarkably, it maintains robust performance as PLLaVA even as video length increases up to 8 times. Besides, the frame retrieval results on our specialized Needle in a Video Haystack (NIAVH) benchmark, further validate VideoLLaMB's prowess in accurately identifying specific frames within lengthy videos. Our SceneTilling algorithm also enables the generation of streaming video captions directly, without necessitating additional training. In terms of efficiency, VideoLLaMB, trained on 16 frames, supports up to 320 frames on a single Nvidia A100 GPU with linear GPU memory scaling, ensuring both high performance and cost-effectiveness, thereby setting a new foundation for long-form video-language models in both academic and practical applications.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 2, 2024 6

AudioStory: Generating Long-Form Narrative Audio with Large Language Models

Recent advances in text-to-audio (TTA) generation excel at synthesizing short audio clips but struggle with long-form narrative audio, which requires temporal coherence and compositional reasoning. To address this gap, we propose AudioStory, a unified framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) with TTA systems to generate structured, long-form audio narratives. AudioStory possesses strong instruction-following reasoning generation capabilities. It employs LLMs to decompose complex narrative queries into temporally ordered sub-tasks with contextual cues, enabling coherent scene transitions and emotional tone consistency. AudioStory has two appealing features: (1) Decoupled bridging mechanism: AudioStory disentangles LLM-diffuser collaboration into two specialized components, i.e., a bridging query for intra-event semantic alignment and a residual query for cross-event coherence preservation. (2) End-to-end training: By unifying instruction comprehension and audio generation within a single end-to-end framework, AudioStory eliminates the need for modular training pipelines while enhancing synergy between components. Furthermore, we establish a benchmark AudioStory-10K, encompassing diverse domains such as animated soundscapes and natural sound narratives. Extensive experiments show the superiority of AudioStory on both single-audio generation and narrative audio generation, surpassing prior TTA baselines in both instruction-following ability and audio fidelity. Our code is available at https://github.com/TencentARC/AudioStory

  • 7 authors
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Aug 27 3

YuE: Scaling Open Foundation Models for Long-Form Music Generation

We tackle the task of long-form music generation--particularly the challenging lyrics-to-song problem--by introducing YuE, a family of open foundation models based on the LLaMA2 architecture. Specifically, YuE scales to trillions of tokens and generates up to five minutes of music while maintaining lyrical alignment, coherent musical structure, and engaging vocal melodies with appropriate accompaniment. It achieves this through (1) track-decoupled next-token prediction to overcome dense mixture signals, (2) structural progressive conditioning for long-context lyrical alignment, and (3) a multitask, multiphase pre-training recipe to converge and generalize. In addition, we redesign the in-context learning technique for music generation, enabling versatile style transfer (e.g., converting Japanese city pop into an English rap while preserving the original accompaniment) and bidirectional generation. Through extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that YuE matches or even surpasses some of the proprietary systems in musicality and vocal agility. In addition, fine-tuning YuE enables additional controls and enhanced support for tail languages. Furthermore, beyond generation, we show that YuE's learned representations can perform well on music understanding tasks, where the results of YuE match or exceed state-of-the-art methods on the MARBLE benchmark. Keywords: lyrics2song, song generation, long-form, foundation model, music generation

  • 57 authors
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Mar 11 3

A Comprehensive Survey on Long Context Language Modeling

Efficient processing of long contexts has been a persistent pursuit in Natural Language Processing. With the growing number of long documents, dialogues, and other textual data, it is important to develop Long Context Language Models (LCLMs) that can process and analyze extensive inputs in an effective and efficient way. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on recent advances in long-context modeling for large language models. Our survey is structured around three key aspects: how to obtain effective and efficient LCLMs, how to train and deploy LCLMs efficiently, and how to evaluate and analyze LCLMs comprehensively. For the first aspect, we discuss data strategies, architectural designs, and workflow approaches oriented with long context processing. For the second aspect, we provide a detailed examination of the infrastructure required for LCLM training and inference. For the third aspect, we present evaluation paradigms for long-context comprehension and long-form generation, as well as behavioral analysis and mechanism interpretability of LCLMs. Beyond these three key aspects, we thoroughly explore the diverse application scenarios where existing LCLMs have been deployed and outline promising future development directions. This survey provides an up-to-date review of the literature on long-context LLMs, which we wish to serve as a valuable resource for both researchers and engineers. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at: https://github.com/LCLM-Horizon/A-Comprehensive-Survey-For-Long-Context-Language-Modeling{\color[RGB]{175,36,67}{LCLM-Horizon}}.

  • 37 authors
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Mar 20 2

Toward Conversational Agents with Context and Time Sensitive Long-term Memory

There has recently been growing interest in conversational agents with long-term memory which has led to the rapid development of language models that use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Until recently, most work on RAG has focused on information retrieval from large databases of texts, like Wikipedia, rather than information from long-form conversations. In this paper, we argue that effective retrieval from long-form conversational data faces two unique problems compared to static database retrieval: 1) time/event-based queries, which requires the model to retrieve information about previous conversations based on time or the order of a conversational event (e.g., the third conversation on Tuesday), and 2) ambiguous queries that require surrounding conversational context to understand. To better develop RAG-based agents that can deal with these challenges, we generate a new dataset of ambiguous and time-based questions that build upon a recent dataset of long-form, simulated conversations, and demonstrate that standard RAG based approaches handle such questions poorly. We then develop a novel retrieval model which combines chained-of-table search methods, standard vector-database retrieval, and a prompting method to disambiguate queries, and demonstrate that this approach substantially improves over current methods at solving these tasks. We believe that this new dataset and more advanced RAG agent can act as a key benchmark and stepping stone towards effective memory augmented conversational agents that can be used in a wide variety of AI applications.

  • 4 authors
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May 29, 2024

LongVideoBench: A Benchmark for Long-context Interleaved Video-Language Understanding

Large multimodal models (LMMs) are processing increasingly longer and richer inputs. Albeit the progress, few public benchmark is available to measure such development. To mitigate this gap, we introduce LongVideoBench, a question-answering benchmark that features video-language interleaved inputs up to an hour long. Our benchmark includes 3,763 varying-length web-collected videos with their subtitles across diverse themes, designed to comprehensively evaluate LMMs on long-term multimodal understanding. To achieve this, we interpret the primary challenge as to accurately retrieve and reason over detailed multimodal information from long inputs. As such, we formulate a novel video question-answering task termed referring reasoning. Specifically, as part of the question, it contains a referring query that references related video contexts, called referred context. The model is then required to reason over relevant video details from the referred context. Following the paradigm of referring reasoning, we curate 6,678 human-annotated multiple-choice questions in 17 fine-grained categories, establishing one of the most comprehensive benchmarks for long-form video understanding. Evaluations suggest that the LongVideoBench presents significant challenges even for the most advanced proprietary models (e.g. GPT-4o, Gemini-1.5-Pro, GPT-4-Turbo), while their open-source counterparts show an even larger performance gap. In addition, our results indicate that model performance on the benchmark improves only when they are capable of processing more frames, positioning LongVideoBench as a valuable benchmark for evaluating future-generation long-context LMMs.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 22, 2024 4

CaLMQA: Exploring culturally specific long-form question answering across 23 languages

Despite rising global usage of large language models (LLMs), their ability to generate long-form answers to culturally specific questions remains unexplored in many languages. To fill this gap, we perform the first study of textual multilingual long-form QA by creating CaLMQA, a dataset of 51.7K culturally specific questions across 23 different languages. We define culturally specific questions as those that refer to concepts unique to one or a few cultures, or have different answers depending on the cultural or regional context. We obtain these questions by crawling naturally-occurring questions from community web forums in high-resource languages, and by hiring native speakers to write questions in under-resourced, rarely-studied languages such as Fijian and Kirundi. Our data collection methodologies are translation-free, enabling the collection of culturally unique questions like "Kuber iki umwami wa mbere w'uburundi yitwa Ntare?" (Kirundi; English translation: "Why was the first king of Burundi called Ntare (Lion)?"). We evaluate factuality, relevance and surface-level quality of LLM-generated long-form answers, finding that (1) for many languages, even the best models make critical surface-level errors (e.g., answering in the wrong language, repetition), especially for low-resource languages; and (2) answers to culturally specific questions contain more factual errors than answers to culturally agnostic questions -- questions that have consistent meaning and answer across many cultures. We release CaLMQA to facilitate future research in cultural and multilingual long-form QA.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 25, 2024

EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding

We introduce EgoSchema, a very long-form video question-answering dataset, and benchmark to evaluate long video understanding capabilities of modern vision and language systems. Derived from Ego4D, EgoSchema consists of over 5000 human curated multiple choice question answer pairs, spanning over 250 hours of real video data, covering a very broad range of natural human activity and behavior. For each question, EgoSchema requires the correct answer to be selected between five given options based on a three-minute-long video clip. While some prior works have proposed video datasets with long clip lengths, we posit that merely the length of the video clip does not truly capture the temporal difficulty of the video task that is being considered. To remedy this, we introduce temporal certificate sets, a general notion for capturing the intrinsic temporal understanding length associated with a broad range of video understanding tasks & datasets. Based on this metric, we find EgoSchema to have intrinsic temporal lengths over 5.7x longer than the second closest dataset and 10x to 100x longer than any other video understanding dataset. Further, our evaluation of several current state-of-the-art video and language models shows them to be severely lacking in long-term video understanding capabilities. Even models with several billions of parameters achieve QA accuracy less than 33% (random is 20%) on the EgoSchema multi-choice question answering task, while humans achieve about 76% accuracy. We posit that {}, with its long intrinsic temporal structures and diverse complexity, would serve as a valuable evaluation probe for developing effective long-term video understanding systems in the future. Data and Zero-shot model evaluation code are open-sourced for both public and commercial use under the Ego4D license at http://egoschema.github.io

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 17, 2023

Re-thinking Temporal Search for Long-Form Video Understanding

Efficient understanding of long-form videos remains a significant challenge in computer vision. In this work, we revisit temporal search paradigms for long-form video understanding, studying a fundamental issue pertaining to all state-of-the-art (SOTA) long-context vision-language models (VLMs). In particular, our contributions are two-fold: First, we formulate temporal search as a Long Video Haystack problem, i.e., finding a minimal set of relevant frames (typically one to five) among tens of thousands of frames from real-world long videos given specific queries. To validate our formulation, we create LV-Haystack, the first benchmark containing 3,874 human-annotated instances with fine-grained evaluation metrics for assessing keyframe search quality and computational efficiency. Experimental results on LV-Haystack highlight a significant research gap in temporal search capabilities, with SOTA keyframe selection methods achieving only 2.1% temporal F1 score on the LVBench subset. Next, inspired by visual search in images, we re-think temporal searching and propose a lightweight keyframe searching framework, T*, which casts the expensive temporal search as a spatial search problem. T* leverages superior visual localization capabilities typically used in images and introduces an adaptive zooming-in mechanism that operates across both temporal and spatial dimensions. Our extensive experiments show that when integrated with existing methods, T* significantly improves SOTA long-form video understanding performance. Specifically, under an inference budget of 32 frames, T* improves GPT-4o's performance from 50.5% to 53.1% and LLaVA-OneVision-72B's performance from 56.5% to 62.4% on LongVideoBench XL subset. Our PyTorch code, benchmark dataset and models are included in the Supplementary material.

  • 12 authors
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Apr 3

Selective Structured State-Spaces for Long-Form Video Understanding

Effective modeling of complex spatiotemporal dependencies in long-form videos remains an open problem. The recently proposed Structured State-Space Sequence (S4) model with its linear complexity offers a promising direction in this space. However, we demonstrate that treating all image-tokens equally as done by S4 model can adversely affect its efficiency and accuracy. To address this limitation, we present a novel Selective S4 (i.e., S5) model that employs a lightweight mask generator to adaptively select informative image tokens resulting in more efficient and accurate modeling of long-term spatiotemporal dependencies in videos. Unlike previous mask-based token reduction methods used in transformers, our S5 model avoids the dense self-attention calculation by making use of the guidance of the momentum-updated S4 model. This enables our model to efficiently discard less informative tokens and adapt to various long-form video understanding tasks more effectively. However, as is the case for most token reduction methods, the informative image tokens could be dropped incorrectly. To improve the robustness and the temporal horizon of our model, we propose a novel long-short masked contrastive learning (LSMCL) approach that enables our model to predict longer temporal context using shorter input videos. We present extensive comparative results using three challenging long-form video understanding datasets (LVU, COIN and Breakfast), demonstrating that our approach consistently outperforms the previous state-of-the-art S4 model by up to 9.6% accuracy while reducing its memory footprint by 23%.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 25, 2023

LongEmotion: Measuring Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models in Long-Context Interaction

Large language models (LLMs) make significant progress in Emotional Intelligence (EI) and long-context understanding. However, existing benchmarks tend to overlook certain aspects of EI in long-context scenarios, especially under realistic, practical settings where interactions are lengthy, diverse, and often noisy. To move towards such realistic settings, we present LongEmotion, a benchmark specifically designed for long-context EI tasks. It covers a diverse set of tasks, including Emotion Classification, Emotion Detection, Emotion QA, Emotion Conversation, Emotion Summary, and Emotion Expression. On average, the input length for these tasks reaches 8,777 tokens, with long-form generation required for Emotion Expression. To enhance performance under realistic constraints, we incorporate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Collaborative Emotional Modeling (CoEM), and compare them with standard prompt-based methods. Unlike conventional approaches, our RAG method leverages both the conversation context and the large language model itself as retrieval sources, avoiding reliance on external knowledge bases. The CoEM method further improves performance by decomposing the task into five stages, integrating both retrieval augmentation and limited knowledge injection. Experimental results show that both RAG and CoEM consistently enhance EI-related performance across most long-context tasks, advancing LLMs toward more practical and real-world EI applications. Furthermore, we conducted a comparative case study experiment on the GPT series to demonstrate the differences among various models in terms of EI. Code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/LongEmotion/LongEmotion, and the project page can be found at https://longemotion.github.io/.

L-Eval: Instituting Standardized Evaluation for Long Context Language Models

Recently, there has been growing interest in extending the context length of instruction-following models in order to effectively process single-turn long input (e.g. summarizing a paper) and conversations with more extensive histories. While proprietary models such as GPT-4 and Claude have demonstrated considerable advancements in handling tens of thousands of tokens of context, open-sourced models are still in the early stages of experimentation. It also remains unclear whether developing these long context models can offer substantial gains on practical downstream tasks over retrieval-based methods or models simply trained on chunked contexts. To address this challenge, we propose to institute standardized evaluation for long context language models. Concretely, we develop L-Eval which contains 411 long documents and over 2,000 query-response pairs manually annotated and checked by the authors encompassing areas such as law, finance, school lectures, lengthy conversations, news, long-form novels, and meetings. L-Eval also adopts diverse evaluation methods and instruction styles, enabling a more reliable assessment of Long Context Language Models (LCLMs). Our findings indicate that while open-source models typically lag behind their commercial counterparts, they still exhibit impressive performance. LLaMA2 achieves the best results (win 45\% vs turbo-16k) on open-ended tasks with only 4k context length and ChatGLM2 achieves the best results on closed-ended tasks with 8k input tokens. We release our new evaluation suite, code, and all generation results including predictions from all open-sourced LCLMs, GPT4-32k, Cluade-100k at {https://github.com/OpenLMLab/LEval}.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 20, 2023

EIPE-text: Evaluation-Guided Iterative Plan Extraction for Long-Form Narrative Text Generation

Plan-and-Write is a common hierarchical approach in long-form narrative text generation, which first creates a plan to guide the narrative writing. Following this approach, several studies rely on simply prompting large language models for planning, which often yields suboptimal results. In this paper, we propose a new framework called Evaluation-guided Iterative Plan Extraction for long-form narrative text generation (EIPE-text), which extracts plans from the corpus of narratives and utilizes the extracted plans to construct a better planner. EIPE-text has three stages: plan extraction, learning, and inference. In the plan extraction stage, it iteratively extracts and improves plans from the narrative corpus and constructs a plan corpus. We propose a question answer (QA) based evaluation mechanism to automatically evaluate the plans and generate detailed plan refinement instructions to guide the iterative improvement. In the learning stage, we build a better planner by fine-tuning with the plan corpus or in-context learning with examples in the plan corpus. Finally, we leverage a hierarchical approach to generate long-form narratives. We evaluate the effectiveness of EIPE-text in the domains of novels and storytelling. Both GPT-4-based evaluations and human evaluations demonstrate that our method can generate more coherent and relevant long-form narratives. Our code will be released in the future.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 12, 2023 1

From Frames to Clips: Efficient Key Clip Selection for Long-Form Video Understanding

Video Large Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable results on a variety of vision language tasks, yet their practical use is limited by the "needle in a haystack" problem: the massive number of visual tokens produced from raw video frames exhausts the model's context window. Existing solutions alleviate this issue by selecting a sparse set of frames, thereby reducing token count, but such frame-wise selection discards essential temporal dynamics, leading to suboptimal reasoning about motion and event continuity. In this work we systematically explore the impact of temporal information and demonstrate that extending selection from isolated key frames to key clips, which are short, temporally coherent segments, improves video understanding. To maintain a fixed computational budget while accommodating the larger token footprint of clips, we propose an adaptive resolution strategy that dynamically balances spatial resolution and clip length, ensuring a constant token count per video. Experiments on three long-form video benchmarks demonstrate that our training-free approach, F2C, outperforms uniform sampling up to 8.1%, 5.6%, and 10.3% on Video-MME, LongVideoBench and MLVU benchmarks, respectively. These results highlight the importance of preserving temporal coherence in frame selection and provide a practical pathway for scaling Video LLMs to real world video understanding applications. Project webpage is available at https://guangyusun.com/f2c .

amazon Amazon
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Oct 2

VideoAgent2: Enhancing the LLM-Based Agent System for Long-Form Video Understanding by Uncertainty-Aware CoT

Long video understanding has emerged as an increasingly important yet challenging task in computer vision. Agent-based approaches are gaining popularity for processing long videos, as they can handle extended sequences and integrate various tools to capture fine-grained information. However, existing methods still face several challenges: (1) they often rely solely on the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) without dedicated mechanisms to enhance reasoning in long video scenarios; and (2) they remain vulnerable to errors or noise from external tools. To address these issues, we propose a specialized chain-of-thought (CoT) process tailored for long video analysis. Our proposed CoT with plan-adjust mode enables the LLM to incrementally plan and adapt its information-gathering strategy. We further incorporate heuristic uncertainty estimation of both the LLM and external tools to guide the CoT process. This allows the LLM to assess the reliability of newly collected information, refine its collection strategy, and make more robust decisions when synthesizing final answers. Empirical experiments show that our uncertainty-aware CoT effectively mitigates noise from external tools, leading to more reliable outputs. We implement our approach in a system called VideoAgent2, which also includes additional modules such as general context acquisition and specialized tool design. Evaluation on three dedicated long video benchmarks (and their subsets) demonstrates that VideoAgent2 outperforms the previous state-of-the-art agent-based method, VideoAgent, by an average of 13.1% and achieves leading performance among all zero-shot approaches

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 6

X-LeBench: A Benchmark for Extremely Long Egocentric Video Understanding

Long-form egocentric video understanding provides rich contextual information and unique insights into long-term human behaviors, holding significant potential for applications in embodied intelligence, long-term activity analysis, and personalized assistive technologies. However, existing benchmark datasets primarily focus on single, short-duration videos or moderately long videos up to dozens of minutes, leaving a substantial gap in evaluating extensive, ultra-long egocentric video recordings. To address this, we introduce X-LeBench, a novel benchmark dataset specifically crafted for evaluating tasks on extremely long egocentric video recordings. Leveraging the advanced text processing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), X-LeBench develops a life-logging simulation pipeline that produces realistic, coherent daily plans aligned with real-world video data. This approach enables the flexible integration of synthetic daily plans with real-world footage from Ego4D-a massive-scale egocentric video dataset covers a wide range of daily life scenarios-resulting in 432 simulated video life logs that mirror realistic daily activities in contextually rich scenarios. The video life-log durations span from 23 minutes to 16.4 hours. The evaluation of several baseline systems and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) reveals their poor performance across the board, highlighting the inherent challenges of long-form egocentric video understanding and underscoring the need for more advanced models.

  • 10 authors
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Jan 12

Contextual Memory Reweaving in Large Language Models Using Layered Latent State Reconstruction

Memory retention challenges in deep neural architectures have ongoing limitations in the ability to process and recall extended contextual information. Token dependencies degrade as sequence length increases, leading to a decline in coherence and factual consistency across longer outputs. A structured approach is introduced to mitigate this issue through the reweaving of latent states captured at different processing layers, reinforcing token representations over extended sequences. The proposed Contextual Memory Reweaving framework incorporates a Layered Latent State Reconstruction mechanism to systematically integrate past contextual embeddings without introducing external memory modules. Experimental results demonstrate improvements in recall accuracy across a range of sequence lengths, with notable gains in the retention of rarely occurring tokens and numerical reasoning consistency. Further analysis of computational efficiency indicates that the additional processing overhead remains within acceptable thresholds, enabling scalability across different model sizes. Evaluations in long-form text generation and ambiguous query resolution highlight the capacity of memory reweaving to enhance continuity and reduce inconsistencies over extended outputs. Attention weight distributions reveal more structured allocation patterns, suggesting that reweaved latent states contribute to improved contextual awareness. The findings establish a framework for refining memory retention mechanisms in language models, addressing long-standing challenges in handling complex, multi-step reasoning tasks.

  • 5 authors
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Feb 4