VideoStir: Understanding Long Videos via Spatio-Temporally Structured and Intent-Aware RAG
Honghao Fu The University of Queensland, Miao Xu The University of Queensland and RIKEN, Yiwei Wang University of California, Merced, Dailing Zhang Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jun Liu Lancaster University, Yujun Cai The University of Queensland
Scaling multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to long videos is constrained by limited context windows. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a promising remedy by organizing query-relevant visual evidence into a compact context, most existing methods (i) flatten videos into independent segments, breaking their inherent spatio-temporal structure, and (ii) depend on explicit semantic matching, which can miss cues that are implicitly relevant to the query’s intent. To overcome these limitations, we propose VideoStir, a structured and intent-aware long-video RAG framework. It firstly structures a video as a spatio-temporal graph at clip level, and then performs multi-hop retrieval to aggregate evidence across distant yet contextually related events. Furthermore, it introduces an MLLM-backed intent-relevance scorer that retrieves frames based on their alignment with the query’s reasoning intent. To support this capability, we curate IR-600K, a large-scale dataset tailored for learning frame–query intent alignment. Experiments show that VideoStir is competitive with state-of-the-art baselines without relying on auxiliary information, highlighting the promise of shifting long-video RAG from flattened semantic matching to structured, intent-aware reasoning. Codes and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/RomGai/VideoStir.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表