# SagaQA: A Multi-hop Reasoning Benchmark for Long-form Narrative Understanding in TV Series

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03301 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03301/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 30 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

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

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21075/) (2024)
- [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)
- [MLVU: Benchmarking Multi-task Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04264/) (2024)
- [VideoTree: Adaptive Tree-based Video Representation for LLM Reasoning on Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19209/) (2024)
- [Video-Holmes: Can MLLM Think Like Holmes for Complex Video Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21374/) (2025)
- [Thinking With Videos: Multimodal Tool-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Long Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04416/) (2025)
- [Scaling RL to Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07966/) (2025)
- [VideoRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Extreme Long-Context Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01549/) (2025)
- [Too Many Frames, Not All Useful: Efficient Strategies for Long-Form Video QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09396/) (2024)
- [Ego-R1: Chain-of-Tool-Thought for Ultra-Long Egocentric Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13654/) (2025)
- [LongVT: Incentivizing "Thinking with Long Videos" via Native Tool Calling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20785/) (2025)
- [VCA: Video Curious Agent for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10471/) (2024)
- [VideoAgent2: Enhancing the LLM-Based Agent System for Long-Form Video Understanding by Uncertainty-Aware CoT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04471/) (2025)
- [VideoExplorer: Think With Videos For Agentic Long-Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10821/) (2025)
- [CoS: Chain-of-Shot Prompting for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06428/) (2025)
- [FRAG: Frame Selection Augmented Generation for Long Video and Long Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17447/) (2025)
- [ReWatch-R1: Boosting Complex Video Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models through Agentic Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23652/) (2025)
- [VRBench: A Benchmark for Multi-Step Reasoning in Long Narrative Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10857/) (2025)
- [Agentic Very Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18157/) (2026)
- [Watching, Reasoning, and Searching: A Video Deep Research Benchmark on Open Web for Agentic Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06943/) (2026)
- [Multi-RAG: A Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation System for Adaptive Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23990/) (2025)
- [E-VRAG: Enhancing Long Video Understanding with Resource-Efficient Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01546/) (2025)
- [Video-Browser: Towards Agentic Open-web Video Browsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23044/) (2025)
- [CausalStep: A Benchmark for Explicit Stepwise Causal Reasoning in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16878/) (2025)
- [EEA: Exploration-Exploitation Agent for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03500/) (2025)

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

- [Towards High-Level Semantic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24082/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce SagaQA, a long-form video benchmark for multi-hop reasoning over full-length TV series. Existing video reasoning benchmarks often emphasize local understanding of adjacent frames or clips. SagaQA addresses this gap by requiring high-level comprehension of extended multimodal narratives in entire TV shows. A distinguishing feature of SagaQA is the granularity of its reasoning steps. Our dataset necessitates long-range reasoning hops to connect information across completely different episodes. This requires models to reason over entire events and actions, demanding a deep understanding of the show's narration and progression at a multimodal level. Motivated by recent progress in agentic methods, we further study how different planning strategies handle such complex reasoning. We categorize these approaches into three classes-Parallel, Sequential, and Hybrid planners-and evaluate their ability to generate coherent and complete reasoning plans. Our results on SagaQA suggest that hybrid planners consistently produce higher-quality plans and exhibit stronger capabilities for complex, high-level narrative understanding in TV shows.