# Scaling Video Understanding via Compact Latent Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00444 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00444/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 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 53 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [GPTQ: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17323/) (2022)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07924/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [Visual ChatGPT: Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04671/) (2023)
- [LongVideoBench: A Benchmark for Long-context Interleaved Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15754/) (2024)
- [Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06676/) (2016)
- [VideoLLaMA 3: Frontier Multimodal Foundation Models for Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13106/) (2025)
- [MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11381/) (2023)
- [Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21776/) (2025)
- [LVBench: An Extreme Long Video Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08035/) (2024)
- [ShareGPT4Video: Improving Video Understanding and Generation with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04325/) (2024)
- [Learning Multiagent Communication with Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07736/) (2016)
- [VideoAgent: Long-form Video Understanding with Large Language Model as Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10517/) (2024)
- [MLVU: Benchmarking Multi-task Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04264/) (2024)
- [MM-LLMs: Recent Advances in MultiModal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13601/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Beyond the Single Camera: Agentic Multi-View Reasoning in Sports Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11844/) (2026)
- [From Semantic to Token Communication: The Next Paradigm for Large-Model-Driven 6G Intelligent Connectivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10714/) (2026)
- [Collaborative Memory for Multi-Agent VLM Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17921/) (2026)
- [Video Evidence Indexing: Learning Where to Look from Video Previews for Token-Budgeted Long-Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00757/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) advance vision language understanding but face inherent limitations in long-video tasks due to bounded perception context budgets. Existing agentic methods mitigate this via rule-based preprocessing, yet often suffer from information loss, high cost, and reliance on textual intermediates. We propose MACF, an end-to-end Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework that decouples per-agent perception budgets from global video complexity, enabling scalable video understanding while preserving visual fidelity. MACF partitions videos into segments for locally budgeted agents and enables holistic reasoning via an agent-native latent communication protocol. Each agent encodes partial observations into compact, task-sufficient tokens in a shared embedding space, allowing efficient and information-preserving collaboration by a central coordinator. We introduce a curriculum training strategy that progressively enforces semantic alignment, evidence summarization, and cross-agent coordination. Extensive experiments on diverse video understanding benchmarks show that MACF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MLLMs and multi-agent systems under identical budget constraints, demonstrating the effectiveness of our latent collaboration for scalable video understanding.