Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance on video question answering, but their application to long-form videos is constrained by limited context length and computational cost, making keyframe sampling essential. Existing approaches typically rely on semantic relevance or reinforcement learning, which either fail to capture evidential clues or suffer from inefficient combinatorial optimization. In this work, we propose an evidence-driven keyframe sampling framework motivated by an information-theoretic perspective. We consider maximizing the conditional mutual information between the selected frames and the answer given the query as an idealized objective, and use a modular singleton-gain surrogate to motivate a tractable frame-wise selection criterion. Guided by this motivation, we train a query-conditioned evidence scoring network using annotated answer-supporting segments. A contrastive objective encourages greater aggregate score mass on frames from evidence regions than on background frames, providing a practical evidence-based criterion beyond semantic similarity. Experiments on long-form video understanding benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms prior sampling strategies under comparable frame budgets. With Qwen2.5-VL-7B under the same 32-frame budget, our method improves over uniform sampling by 10.1 points on LVBench and 4.4 points on the long-video subset of VideoMME.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made substantial advancements in video understanding, yet the reliability of their responses remains underexplored. This work presents a diagnostic study of absent answer detection for MLLMs in video understanding, where the correct answer is deliberately excluded from the candidate set and a reliable model is expected to recognize that no valid option exists. We evaluate the absent answer detection behavior under three settings: multiple-choice questions augmented with a ``None of the Above'' option, open-ended generation with a detection instruction, and standard evaluation without any guidance. Across a diverse set of models and benchmarks, we find that MLLMs overwhelmingly select plausible distractors rather than detecting the absent answer. This failure is more pronounced in temporal reasoning tasks and worsens with denser frame sampling. We further explore chain-of-thought prompting as a mitigation strategy and find that while it substantially improves detection rates, performance remains unsatisfactory, suggesting that prompting-based strategies alone are insufficient to fully address this limitation. These findings expose a systematic failure in absent answer detection and highlight the need for explicit detection mechanisms in multimodal systems.