mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Graph-to-Frame RAG: Visual-Space Knowledge Fusion for Training-Free and Auditable Video Reasoning

arXiv 2604.04372 ↗First posted 6 Apr 2026cs.CVcited by 2

On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → Video understanding with MLLMs

Abstract (arXiv)

When video reasoning requires external knowledge, many systems with large multimodal models (LMMs) adopt retrieval augmentation to supply the missing context. Appending textual or multi-clip evidence, however, forces heterogeneous signals into a single attention space. We observe diluted attention and higher cognitive load even on non-long videos. The bottleneck is not only what to retrieve but how to represent and fuse external knowledge with the video backbone.We present Graph-to-Frame RAG (G2F-RAG), a training free and auditable paradigm that delivers knowledge in the visual space. On the offline stage, an agent builds a problem-agnostic video knowledge graph that integrates entities, events, spatial relations, and linked world knowledge. On the online stage, a hierarchical multi-agent controller decides whether external knowledge is needed, retrieves a minimal sufficient subgraph, and renders it as a single reasoning frame appended to the video. LMMs then perform joint reasoning in a unified visual domain. This design reduces cognitive load and leaves an explicit, inspectable evidence trail.G2F-RAG is plug-and-play across backbones and scales. It yields consistent gains on diverse public benchmarks, with larger improvements in knowledge-intensive settings. Ablations further confirm that knowledge representation and delivery matter. G2F-RAG reframes retrieval as visual space knowledge fusion for robust and interpretable video reasoning.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 56 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2026.

Builds on

56 of 63 references.

Closest ancestors · 11

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025VTimeCoT: Thinking by Drawing for Video Temporal Grounding and Reasoning16 Oct
  2. 2025AdaVideoRAG: Omni-Contextual Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Efficient Long Video Understanding16 Jun
  3. 2025Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs27 Mar
  4. 2025Vamba: Understanding Hour-Long Videos with Hybrid Mamba-Transformers14 Mar
  5. 2025InternVideo2.5: Empowering Video MLLMs with Long and Rich Context Modeling21 Jan
  6. 2024VideoChat-Flash: Hierarchical Compression for Long-Context Video Modeling31 Dec
  7. 2024LongVILA: Scaling Long-Context Visual Language Models for Long Videos19 Aug
  8. 2024MMBench-Video: A Long-Form Multi-Shot Benchmark for Holistic Video Understanding20 Jun
  9. 2024Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis31 May
  10. 2023MVBench: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Video Understanding Benchmark28 Nov
  11. 2023Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding5 Jun

Other references · 45

  1. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
  2. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  3. 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,792
  4. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  5. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,467
  6. 2023Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 4,362
  7. 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,151
  8. 2023Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contextscited by 3,383
  9. 2024Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of contextcited by 3,175
  10. 2023InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Taskscited by 2,534
  11. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
  12. 2023Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 2,185
33 more
  1. 2023Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyondcited by 2,179
  2. 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,769
  3. 2024Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scalingcited by 1,573
  4. 2025InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiencycited by 1,419
  5. 2024MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phonecited by 1,061
  6. 2024VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMscited by 749
  7. 2023VILA: On Pre-training for Visual Language Modelscited by 686
  8. 2024Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spacescited by 580
  9. 2025VideoLLaMA 3: Frontier Multimodal Foundation Models for Image and Video Understandingcited by 502
  10. 2024TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos?cited by 352
  11. 2024MLVU: Benchmarking Multi-task Long Video Understandingcited by 275
  12. 2025Video-MMMU: Evaluating Knowledge Acquisition from Multi-Discipline Professional Videoscited by 225
  13. 2025MiniCPM-V 4.5: Cooking Efficient MLLMs via Architecture, Data, and Training Recipecited by 174
  14. 2025DeepSeek-OCR: Contexts Optical Compressioncited by 174
  15. 2024Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Graphs (GraphRAG)cited by 170
  16. 2024TinyLLaVA: A Framework of Small-scale Large Multimodal Modelscited by 164
  17. 2024Video-RAG: Visually-aligned Retrieval-Augmented Long Video Comprehensioncited by 134
  18. 2025Deep Video Discovery: Agentic Search with Tool Use for Long-form Video Understandingcited by 94
  19. 2025Words or Vision: Do Vision-Language Models Have Blind Faith in Text?cited by 86
  20. 2024Wiki-LLaVA: Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multimodal LLMscited by 79
  21. 2025VideoRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Extreme Long-Context Videoscited by 76
  22. 2024StructRAG: Boosting Knowledge Intensive Reasoning of LLMs via Inference-time Hybrid Information Structurizationcited by 70
  23. 2024Number it: Temporal Grounding Videos like Flipping Mangacited by 65
  24. 2025VideoChat-R1.5: Visual Test-Time Scaling to Reinforce Multimodal Reasoning by Iterative Perceptioncited by 60
  25. 2019VideoGraph: Recognizing Minutes-Long Human Activities in Videoscited by 57
  26. 2024Goldfish: Vision-Language Understanding of Arbitrarily Long Videoscited by 38
  27. 2024LLaVA-KD: A Framework of Distilling Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 37
  28. 2025Vgent: Graph-based Retrieval-Reasoning-Augmented Generation For Long Video Understandingcited by 30
  29. 2025MR. Video: "MapReduce" is the Principle for Long Video Understandingcited by 23
  30. 2024From Specific-MLLMs to Omni-MLLMs: A Survey on MLLMs Aligned with Multi-modalitiescited by 22
  31. 2025STAR-R1: Spatial TrAnsformation Reasoning by Reinforcing Multimodal LLMscited by 21
  32. 2025VCode: a Multimodal Coding Benchmark with SVG as Symbolic Visual Representationcited by 15
  33. 2022Learning to Purification for Unsupervised Person Re-identificationcited by 11

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026A Skill-augmented Agentic Framework and Benchmark for Multi-Video Understanding
  2. 2025Agentic Video Intelligence: A Flexible Framework for Advanced Video Exploration and Understanding
  3. 2025Video Finetuning Improves Reasoning Between Frames
  4. 2025FrameMind: Frame-Interleaved Video Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning
  5. 2026Think, Then Verify: A Hypothesis-Verification Multi-Agent Framework for Long Video Understanding
  6. 20263rd Place at CVPR 2026 CASTLE Challenge: Agentic Multi-View Long-Context Video Understanding via Hierarchical Knowledge Graph Retrieval
  7. 2026A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite
  8. 2024Video-of-Thought: Step-by-Step Video Reasoning from Perception to Cognition