Kaixiang Ji
Author directory2026
MemDreamer: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Long Video Understanding via Agentic Hierarchical Graph Memory
Cong Chen | Guo Gan | Kaixiang Ji | Zhaoyang Zhang | Zhen Yang | Guangming Yao | Hao Chen | Jingdong Chen | Yi Yuan | Chunhua Shen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Cong Chen | Guo Gan | Kaixiang Ji | Zhaoyang Zhang | Zhen Yang | Guangming Yao | Hao Chen | Jingdong Chen | Yi Yuan | Chunhua Shen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Current Vision-Language Models struggle with hours-long videos because processing full-length visual sequences induces prohibitive token explosion and attention dilution. To overcome this, we introduce MemDreamer to decouple perception and reasoning, shifting long-video understanding into an agentic exploration process. As a plug-and-play framework, it incrementally streams videos to construct a Hierarchical Graph Memory, a top-down three-tier architecture for semantic abstraction, anchored by a foundational graph capturing spatiotemporal and causal relations. During inference, the reasoning model employs agentic tool-augmented retrieval, navigating hierarchies, searching nodes, and traversing logical edges via an Observation-Reason-Action loop. Experiments show MemDreamer achieves SOTA results across four mainstream benchmarks, substantially narrowing the gap with human experts. It greatly reduces the reasoning context relative to full-context ingestion while delivering a substantial absolute accuracy gain. Furthermore, statistical analysis uncovers a strong positive linear correlation between an VLM’s performance on logic reasoning and long-video understanding benchmarks, establishing agentic capability scaling as a new paradigm for multimodal comprehension.