MemoryCard: Topic-Aware Multi-Modal Clue Compression for Long-Video Question Answering

Qing Yang, Pengcheng Huang, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Gang Li, Maosong Sun


Abstract
Long-video question answering remains challenging for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), as answer-relevant evidence is often sparse, transient, and temporally dispersed across lengthy video contexts. Existing frame-centric approaches improve efficiency through uniform sampling, query-aware frame selection, visual-token compression, and adaptive resolution strategies. However, they still rely on isolated and fragmented frames as the fundamental evidence units, limiting VLMs’ ability to capture coherent event-level semantics. To address this limitation, we propose MemoryCard, a video-memory-based augmentation framework that organizes long videos into self-contained Memory Cards. Specifically, MemoryCard first performs a self-reading process over videos and aligned utterances to segment the video into semantically coherent units, each corresponding to a distinct topic or event. For each unit, it generates an event-level video gist and selects representative visual moments, which are then rendered into unified Memory Cards for retrieval and question answering. Experimental results demonstrate that MemoryCard consistently improves long-video QA performance under comparable visual-token budgets, achieving up to a 21.8% relative improvement in accuracy. All code is available at https://github.com/NEUIR/MemoryCard.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.553
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12687–12709
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.553/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qing Yang, Pengcheng Huang, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Gang Li, and Maosong Sun. 2026. MemoryCard: Topic-Aware Multi-Modal Clue Compression for Long-Video Question Answering. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12687–12709, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MemoryCard: Topic-Aware Multi-Modal Clue Compression for Long-Video Question Answering (Yang et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.553.pdf