# InternVideo2.5: Empowering Video MLLMs with Long and Rich Context Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12386 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12386/

## Key facts

- Cited by 211 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 92 of its 105 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 92)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [Frozen in Time: A Joint Video and Image Encoder for End-to-End Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00650/) (2021)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17005/) (2023)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [Token Merging: Your ViT But Faster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09461/) (2022)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [LongVideoBench: A Benchmark for Long-context Interleaved Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15754/) (2024)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01641/) (2017)
- [LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave: Tackling Multi-image, Video, and 3D in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07895/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 211)

- [SmolVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Affordable and Efficient Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01844/) (2025)
- [VideoChat-R1: Enhancing Spatio-Temporal Perception via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06958/) (2025)
- [LLaDA-V: Large Language Diffusion Models with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16933/) (2025)
- [Deep Video Discovery: Agentic Search with Tool Use for Long-form Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18079/) (2025)
- [StreamForest: Efficient Online Video Understanding with Persistent Event Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24871/) (2025)
- [Ego-R1: Chain-of-Tool-Thought for Ultra-Long Egocentric Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13654/) (2025)
- [VideoChat-R1.5: Visual Test-Time Scaling to Reinforce Multimodal Reasoning by Iterative Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21100/) (2025)
- [OneThinker: All-in-one Reasoning Model for Image and Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03043/) (2025)
- [VMBench: A Benchmark for Perception-Aligned Video Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10076/) (2025)
- [video-SALMONN 2: Caption-Enhanced Audio-Visual Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15220/) (2025)
- [VLM4D: Towards Spatiotemporal Awareness in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02095/) (2025)
- [VCR-Bench: A Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Video Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07956/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-OneVision-2: Towards Next-Generation Perceptual Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25979/) (2026)
- [Video Compression Commander: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14454/) (2025)
- [Generative Frame Sampler for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09146/) (2025)
- [Video-MMLU: A Massive Multi-Discipline Lecture Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14693/) (2025)
- [Accelerating Streaming Video Large Language Models via Hierarchical Token Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00891/) (2025)
- [Vamba: Understanding Hour-Long Videos with Hybrid Mamba-Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11579/) (2025)
- [BusterX: MLLM-Powered AI-Generated Video Forgery Detection and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12620/) (2025)
- [Mavors: Multi-granularity Video Representation for Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10068/) (2025)
- [VideoChat-A1: Thinking with Long Videos by Chain-of-Shot Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06097/) (2025)
- [Omni-Captioner: Data Pipeline, Models, and Benchmark for Omni Detailed Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12720/) (2025)
- [Video-SafetyBench: A Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Video LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11842/) (2025)
- [FluxMem: Adaptive Hierarchical Memory for Streaming Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02096/) (2026)
- [InternVL-U: Democratizing Unified Multimodal Models for Understanding, Reasoning, Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09877/) (2026)
- [Modality Curation: Building Universal Embeddings for Advanced Multimodal Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19650/) (2025)
- [Reinforcement Learning Tuning for VideoLLMs: Reward Design and Data Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01908/) (2025)
- [Streaming Video Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21334/) (2025)
- [VideoMathQA: Benchmarking Mathematical Reasoning via Multimodal Understanding in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05349/) (2025)
- [VideoARM: Agentic Reasoning over Hierarchical Memory for Long-Form Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12360/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper aims to improve the performance of video multimodal large language models (MLLM) via long and rich context (LRC) modeling. As a result, we develop a new version of InternVideo2.5 with a focus on enhancing the original MLLMs' ability to perceive fine-grained details and capture long-form temporal structure in videos. Specifically, our approach incorporates dense vision task annotations into MLLMs using direct preference optimization and develops compact spatiotemporal representations through adaptive hierarchical token compression. Experimental results demonstrate this unique design of LRC greatly improves the results of video MLLM in mainstream video understanding benchmarks (short & long), enabling the MLLM to memorize significantly longer video inputs (at least 6x longer than the original), and master specialized vision capabilities like object tracking and segmentation. Our work highlights the importance of multimodal context richness (length and fineness) in empowering MLLM's innate abilites (focus and memory), providing new insights for future research on video MLLM. Code and models are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternVideo/tree/main/InternVideo2.5