Chenxi Qin
Author directory2026
Temporal Gains, Spatial Costs: Revisiting Video Fine-Tuning in Multimodal Large Language Models
Linghao Zhang | Jungang Li | Yonghua Hei | Sicheng Tao | Song Dai | Yibo Yan | Zihao Dongfang | Weiting Liu | Chenxi Qin | Hanqian Li | Xin Zou | Jiahao Zhang | ShuHang Xun | Haiyun Jiang | Xuming Hu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Linghao Zhang | Jungang Li | Yonghua Hei | Sicheng Tao | Song Dai | Yibo Yan | Zihao Dongfang | Weiting Liu | Chenxi Qin | Hanqian Li | Xin Zou | Jiahao Zhang | ShuHang Xun | Haiyun Jiang | Xuming Hu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are typically trained in multiple stages, with video-based supervised fine-tuning (Video-SFT) serving as a key step for improving visual understanding. Yet its effect on the fine-grained evolution of visual capabilities, particularly the balance between spatial and temporal understanding, remains poorly understood. In this paper, we systematically study how Video-SFT reshapes visual capabilities in MLLMs. Across architectures, parameter scales, and frame sampling settings, we observe a consistent pattern: **Video-SFT reliably improves video performance, but often yields limited gains or even degradation on static image benchmarks**. We further show that this trade-off is closely tied to temporal budget: increasing the number of sampled frames generally improves video performance, but does not reliably improve static image performance. Motivated by this finding, we study an instruction-aware Hybrid-Frame strategy that adaptively allocates frame counts and partially mitigates the image-video trade-off. Our results indicate that **Video-SFT is not a free lunch for MLLMs, and preserving spatial understanding remains a central challenge in joint image-video training**.