Perceive Query & Reason: Enhancing Video QA with Question-Guided Temporal Queries

Roberto Amoroso, Gengyuan Zhang, Rajat Koner, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara, Volker Tresp; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 8835-8844

Video Question Answering (Video QA) is a challenging video understanding task that requires models to comprehend entire videos identify the most relevant information based on contextual cues from a given question and reason accurately to provide answers. Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have transformed video QA by leveraging their exceptional commonsense reasoning capabilities. This progress is largely driven by the effective alignment between visual data and the language space of MLLMs. However for video QA an additional space-time alignment poses a considerable challenge for extracting question-relevant information across frames. In this work we investigate diverse temporal modeling techniques to integrate with MLLMs aiming to achieve question-guided temporal modeling that leverages pre-trained visual and textual alignment in MLLMs. We propose T-Former a novel temporal modeling method that creates a question-guided temporal bridge between frame-wise visual perception and the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Our evaluation across multiple video QA benchmarks demonstrates that T-Former competes favorably with existing temporal modeling approaches and aligns with recent advancements in video QA.