# VideoWeave: A Data-Centric Approach for Efficient Video Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06309 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06309/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (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)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18869/) (2024)
- [The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17421/) (2023)
- [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)
- [LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave: Tackling Multi-image, Video, and 3D in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07895/) (2024)
- [InternVid: A Large-scale Video-Text Dataset for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06942/) (2023)
- [Unified Vision-Language Pre-Training for Image Captioning and VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11059/) (2019)
- [ShareGPT4Video: Improving Video Understanding and Generation with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04325/) (2024)
- [Prismatic VLMs: Investigating the Design Space of Visually-Conditioned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07865/) (2024)
- [Prompting Visual-Language Models for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04478/) (2021)
- [Efficient Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03863/) (2023)
- [LongVLM: Efficient Long Video Understanding via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03384/) (2024)
- [Tarsier: Recipes for Training and Evaluating Large Video Description Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00634/) (2024)
- [GPT-4V(ision) as a Generalist Evaluator for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01361/) (2023)
- [HourVideo: 1-Hour Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04998/) (2024)
- [CelebV-Text: A Large-Scale Facial Text-Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14717/) (2023)
- [Unveiling Encoder-Free Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11832/) (2024)
- [VidGen-1M: A Large-Scale Dataset for Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02629/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Human Cognition in Machines: A Unified Perspective of World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16592/) (2026)
- [SurgLQA: Scalable Long-Horizon Surgical Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17915/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Training video-language models is often prohibitively expensive due to the high cost of processing long frame sequences and the limited availability of annotated long videos. We present VideoWeave, a simple yet effective approach to improve data efficiency by constructing synthetic long-context training samples that splice together short, captioned videos from existing datasets. Rather than modifying model architectures or optimization objectives, VideoWeave reorganizes available video-text pairs to expand temporal diversity within fixed compute. We systematically study how different data composition strategies like random versus visually clustered splicing and caption enrichment affect downstream performance on downstream video question answering. Under identical compute constraints, models trained with VideoWeave achieve higher accuracy than conventional video finetuning. Our results highlight that reorganizing training data, rather than altering architectures, may offer a simple and scalable path for training video-language models. We link our code for all experiments here.