Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models

Manan Suri, Sarvesh Baskar, Dinesh Manocha


Abstract
Processing video in vision-language models is expensive: each frame occupies hundreds of tokens, and inference cost scales with every frame and every repeated query. We introduce Frames2LoRA, a method for parametric video internalization. A perceiver hypernetwork reads the intermediate representations produced layer-by-layer as a frozen VLM encodes a video, and generates a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter in a single forward pass. Unlike standard LoRA fine-tuning, which requires iterative gradient updates, Frames2LoRA predicts these weights directly from the video. Trained for SmolVLM2 500M and 2.2B on video summarization and captioning, Frames2LoRA enables the same frozen VLM to answer queries from the adapter alone, with zero visual tokens in its context at query time. Frames2LoRA is statistically non-inferior and equivalent to direct video-in-context inference across all five captioning benchmarks at both model scales, and across seven of eight video question answering benchmark-scale pairings. Although trained only on 12 frames at 384px, it remains stable up to 1,024 frames and 1024px, where direct video-in-context inference often degenerates. Across this sweep, it reduces answer-time visual-token load by up to 1,500x and query TTFT by 6-80x, while preserving video-faithful outputs. We also find that independently generated adapters for non-overlapping video segments can compose in rank space, suggesting a path toward chunked long-video internalization.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1643
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
34951–34989
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1643/
DOI:
10.18653/2026.findings-emnlp.1643
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Manan Suri, Sarvesh Baskar, and Dinesh Manocha. 2026. Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 34951–34989, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models (Suri et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1643.pdf