Towards Sparse Video Understanding and Reasoning

Chenwei Xu, Zhen Ye, Shang Wu, Weijian Li, Zihan Wang, Zhuofan Xia, Lie Lu, Pranav Maneriker, Fan Du, Manling Li, Han Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 11357-11368

We present **ReViSe** (_**Re**asoning with **Vi**deo **S**parsity_), a framework that combines multi-round reasoning with adaptive frame selection for video question answering (VQA). Existing vision-language models (VLMs) uniformly sample video frames, which introduces redundancy or irrelevancy. In contrast, ReViSe*interactively selects informative frames through multi-round reasoning. To achieve this, ReViSe includes three modules: a multi-round conversation module that retains frame selection history as memory; a reasoning tracer that maintains a chain-of-thought across rounds; and a self-correction mechanism that enforces structural and behavioral validity. ReViSe integrates seamlessly with both proprietary and open-source VLMs. It supports proprietary models in a "plug-and-play" manner and enables reinforcement fine-tuning for open-source models. Experiments on multiple VQA benchmarks show that **ReViSe** improves the video understanding ability of VLMs by improving accuracy while reducing the number of frames used.