See More, Think Deeper: Query-Expanded Visual Evidence and Answer-Clue Guided Reflection for Long Video Understanding

Shuning Wang, Zhiheng Wu, YiNuo LU, Naiming Liu, Chen Jia, Bowen Liu, Shuo Nie, Weijie Zhu, Yumeng Zhang


Abstract
Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have enabled performance on long-video understanding tasks. However, existing methods still face two key limitations: evidence acquisition often relies on a single search intent, and answer generation lacks an effective visual feedback mechanism. To address these limitations, we propose CoVER, a Comprehensive Visual Evidence and Reflection framework for long-video understanding. CoVER enables Video-LLMs to See More by dynamically gathering query-expanded visual evidence, and Think Deeper by verifying draft answers with effective answer-specific visual feedback. Together, these mechanisms shift long-video understanding from answer-centric generation to evidence-centric and visually verifiable reasoning. Experimental results show that CoVER-7B substantially outperforms models with the same parameter scale and even surpasses state-of-the-art closed-source models on certain metrics.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.365
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
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Pages:
7643–7659
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.365/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Shuning Wang, Zhiheng Wu, YiNuo LU, Naiming Liu, Chen Jia, Bowen Liu, Shuo Nie, Weijie Zhu, and Yumeng Zhang. 2026. See More, Think Deeper: Query-Expanded Visual Evidence and Answer-Clue Guided Reflection for Long Video Understanding. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 7643–7659, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
See More, Think Deeper: Query-Expanded Visual Evidence and Answer-Clue Guided Reflection for Long Video Understanding (Wang et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.365.pdf