AgentCVR: Active Multi-Agent Cross-Video Reasoning via Script-Simulated Reinforcement Learning

Yilun Qiu, Jiahe Wang, Cilin Yan, Jiayin Cai, Xiaolong Jiang, Yao Hu, Chun Yuan


Abstract
Cross-Video Reasoning (CVR) has emerged as a critical frontier in multimodal intelligence, requiring models to retrieve, align, and aggregate evidence distributed across multiple videos. Current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often struggle with CVR, as simple single-pass strategies encode multiple videos into a shared compressed context, potentially obscuring rare but critical evidence. In this paper, we propose AgentCVR, a multi-agent framework that treats CVR as an active evidence-acquisition task. AgentCVR employs a Master Agent to iteratively coordinate specialized Visual and Audio Agents for targeted evidence extraction. To ensure efficient training, we introduce Script-Simulated RL, which optimizes the agent’s policy with LLM-generated semantic scripts and a lightweight text-based simulator, bypassing costly multimodal inference during online exploration. Experimental results on a comprehensive CVR benchmark show that AgentCVR outperforms single-pass baselines and achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art closed-source systems, particularly in complex cross-video alignment and localization. To ensure reproducibility, our code is available https://github.com/wang-jh24/AgentCVR.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.2294
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:
49180–49211
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2294/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yilun Qiu, Jiahe Wang, Cilin Yan, Jiayin Cai, Xiaolong Jiang, Yao Hu, and Chun Yuan. 2026. AgentCVR: Active Multi-Agent Cross-Video Reasoning via Script-Simulated Reinforcement Learning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 49180–49211, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AgentCVR: Active Multi-Agent Cross-Video Reasoning via Script-Simulated Reinforcement Learning (Qiu et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2294.pdf