Vgent: Graph-based Retrieval-Reasoning-Augmented Generation For Long Video Understanding

Understanding and reasoning over long videos pose significant challenges for large video language models (LVLMs) due to the difficulty in processing intensive video tokens beyond context window and retaining long-term sequential information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has demonstrated effectiveness in processing long context for Large Language Models (LLMs); however, applying RAG to long video faces challenges such as disrupted temporal dependencies and inclusion of irrelevant information that can hinder accurate reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose Vgent, a novel graph-based retrieval-reasoning-augmented generation framework to enhance LVLMs for long video understanding. Our approach introduces two key innovations: (i) It represents videos by structured graphs with semantic relationships across video clips preserved to improve retrieval effectiveness. (ii) It introduces an intermediate reasoning step to mitigate the reasoning limitation of LVLMs, which leverages structured verification to reduce retrieval noise and facilitate the explicit aggregation of relevant information across clips, resulting in more accurate and context-aware responses. We comprehensively evaluate our framework with various open-source LVLMs on three long-video understanding benchmarks. Our approach yielded an overall performance improvement of 3.0%~ 5.4% over base models on MLVU, and outperformed state-of-the-art video RAG methods by 8.6%. Our code is publicly available at https://xiaoqian-shen.github.io/Vgent.