VideoARM: Agentic Reasoning over Hierarchical Memory for Long-Form Video Understanding

Abstract: Long-form video understanding remains challenging due to the extended temporal structure and dense multimodal cues. Despite recent progress, many existing approaches still rely on hand-crafted reasoning pipelines or employ token-consuming video preprocessing to guide MLLMs in autonomous reasoning. To overcome these limitations, we introduce VideoARM, an Agentic Reasoning-over-hierarchical-Memory paradigm for long-form video understanding. Instead of static, exhaustive preprocessing, VideoARM performs adaptive, on-the-fly agentic reasoning and memory construction. Specifically, VideoARM performs an adaptive and continuous loop of observing, thinking, acting, and memorizing, where a controller autonomously invokes tools to interpret the video in a coarse-to-fine manner, thereby substantially reducing token consumption. In parallel, a hierarchical multimodal memory continuously captures and updates multi-level clues throughout the operation of the agent, providing precise contextual information to support the controller in decision-making. Experiments on prevalent benchmarks demonstrate that VideoARM outperforms the state-of-the-art method, DVD, while significantly reducing token consumption for long-form videos.