# Linear Scaling Video VLMs for Long Video Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31598 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31598/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Visual token pruning and efficiency, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 84 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Visual token pruning and efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/visual-token-pruning-and-efficiency/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 84)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [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)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05424/) (2023)
- [SnapKV: LLM Knows What You are Looking for Before Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14469/) (2024)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [H2O: Heavy-Hitter Oracle for Efficient Generative Inference of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14048/) (2023)
- [An Image is Worth 1/2 Tokens After Layer 2: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06764/) (2024)
- [YaRN: Efficient Context Window Extension of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00071/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-Video: Video Instruction Tuning With Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02713/) (2024)
- [LLaMA-VID: An Image is Worth 2 Tokens in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17043/) (2023)
- [MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16449/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DeltaS: Reading the Gated Linear Attention State for KV Cache Eviction in Streaming Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27470/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used in long-horizon and streaming settings, yet most video encoders still rely on spatiotemporal self-attention, causing compute and latency to grow quadratically with the number of frames. Existing efficiency methods improve scalability but often lose accuracy relative to full self-attention, for example through aggressive frame/token dropping or coarse attention approximations. We introduce StateKV, an inference-time method that adapts pretrained long-video VLMs to linear-time video prefill by carrying cross-frame context in a fixed-capacity, importance-based recurrent state, paired with a second full per-frame cache used for decoding. Across three long-video benchmarks and seven models spanning three families and multiple scales, StateKV remains close to full self-attention and consistently outperforms dominant sliding-window / recency-based streaming approximations, without fine-tuning or architectural changes. StateKV also reduces video-prefill cost measured FLOPs, enabling stronger accuracy at a fixed compute budget by running larger models. These results suggest a practical step toward scalable long-video understanding.