Demo-ICL: In-Context Learning for Procedural Video Knowledge Acquisition

Yuhao Dong, Shulin Tian, Shuai Liu, Shuangrui Ding, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Yuhang Cao, Jiaqi Wang, Ziwei Liu


Abstract
Despite the growing video understanding capabilities of recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), existing video benchmarks primarily assess understanding based on models’ static, internal knowledge, rather than their ability to learn and adapt from dynamic, novel contexts from few examples. To bridge this gap, we present Demo-driven Video In-Context Learning, a novel task focused on learning from in-context demonstrations to answer questions about the target videos. Alongside this, we propose Demo-ICL-Bench, a challenging benchmark designed to evaluate demo-driven video in-context learning capabilities. Demo-ICL-Bench is constructed from 1200 instructional YouTube videos with associated questions, from which two types of demonstrations are derived: (i) summarizing video subtitles for text demonstration; and (ii) corresponding instructional videos as video demonstrations. To effectively tackle this new challenge, we develop Demo-ICL, an MLLM with a two-stage training strategy: video supervised fine-tuning and information-assisted direct preference optimization, jointly enhancing the model’s ability to learn from in-context examples. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art MLLMs confirm the difficulty of Demo-ICL-Bench, demonstrate the effectiveness of Demo-ICL, and thus reveal future research directions for video in-context learning.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.732
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:
15381–15399
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.732/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuhao Dong, Shulin Tian, Shuai Liu, Shuangrui Ding, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Yuhang Cao, Jiaqi Wang, and Ziwei Liu. 2026. Demo-ICL: In-Context Learning for Procedural Video Knowledge Acquisition. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 15381–15399, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Demo-ICL: In-Context Learning for Procedural Video Knowledge Acquisition (Dong et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.732.pdf