video agent
MR. Video: MapReduce as an Effective Principle for Long Video Understanding
The fundamental challenge of long video understanding, e.g., question answering, lies in the extensive number of frames, making it infeasible to densely understand the local details while comprehensively digest the global contexts, especially within a limited context length. To address this problem, our insight is to process short video segments individually and combine these segment-level analyses into a final response. This intuition is noted in the well-established MapReduce principle in big data processing and is naturally compatible with inference scaling at the system level. Motivated by this, we propose MR.
MR. Video: MapReduce as an Effective Principle for Long Video Understanding
The fundamental challenge of long video understanding, e.g., question answering, lies in the extensive number of frames, making it infeasible to densely understand the local details while comprehensively digest the global contexts, especially within a limited context length. To address this problem, our insight is to process short video segments individually and combine these segment-level analyses into a final response. This intuition is noted in the well-established MapReduce principle in big data processing and is naturally compatible with inference scaling at the system level. Motivated by this, we propose MR. Video (pronounced as mister video), a long video understanding framework adopting the MapReduce principle. We define the standard operations of MapReduce in a long video understanding context: the Map steps conduct independent and sequence-parallel dense perception on short video segments, covering local details, while the Reduce steps comprehensively aggregate the segment-level results into an answer with global contexts.
A Challenge to Build Neuro-Symbolic Video Agents
Shah, Sahil, Goel, Harsh, Narasimhan, Sai Shankar, Choi, Minkyu, Sharan, S P, Akcin, Oguzhan, Chinchali, Sandeep
Modern video understanding systems excel at tasks such as scene classification, object detection, and short video retrieval. However, as video analysis becomes increasingly central to real-world applications, there is a growing need for proactive video agents for the systems that not only interpret video streams but also reason about events and take informed actions. A key obstacle in this direction is temporal reasoning: while deep learning models have made remarkable progress in recognizing patterns within individual frames or short clips, they struggle to understand the sequencing and dependencies of events over time, which is critical for action-driven decision-making. Addressing this limitation demands moving beyond conventional deep learning approaches. We posit that tackling this challenge requires a neuro-symbolic perspective, where video queries are decomposed into atomic events, structured into coherent sequences, and validated against temporal constraints. Such an approach can enhance interpretability, enable structured reasoning, and provide stronger guarantees on system behavior, all key properties for advancing trustworthy video agents. To this end, we present a grand challenge to the research community: developing the next generation of intelligent video agents that integrate three core capabilities: (1) autonomous video search and analysis, (2) seamless real-world interaction, and (3) advanced content generation. By addressing these pillars, we can transition from passive perception to intelligent video agents that reason, predict, and act, pushing the boundaries of video understanding.
Mobile-Agent-V: Learning Mobile Device Operation Through Video-Guided Multi-Agent Collaboration
Wang, Junyang, Xu, Haiyang, Zhang, Xi, Yan, Ming, Zhang, Ji, Huang, Fei, Sang, Jitao
The rapid increase in mobile device usage necessitates improved automation for seamless task management. However, many AI-driven frameworks struggle due to insufficient operational knowledge. Manually written knowledge helps but is labor-intensive and inefficient. To address these challenges, we introduce Mobile-Agent-V, a framework that leverages video guidance to provide rich and cost-effective operational knowledge for mobile automation. Mobile-Agent-V enhances task execution capabilities by leveraging video inputs without requiring specialized sampling or preprocessing. Mobile-Agent-V integrates a sliding window strategy and incorporates a video agent and deep-reflection agent to ensure that actions align with user instructions. Through this innovative approach, users can record task processes with guidance, enabling the system to autonomously learn and execute tasks efficiently. Experimental results show that Mobile-Agent-V achieves a 30% performance improvement compared to existing frameworks. The code will be open-sourced at https://github.com/X-PLUG/MobileAgent.