# MemoryCard: Topic-Aware Multi-Modal Clue Compression for Long-Video Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05917 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05917/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 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 30 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

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

- [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)
- [LongVideoBench: A Benchmark for Long-context Interleaved Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15754/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-Video: Video Instruction Tuning With Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02713/) (2024)
- [Long Context Transfer from Language to Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16852/) (2024)
- [LongVU: Spatiotemporal Adaptive Compression for Long Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17434/) (2024)
- [VideoAgent: Long-form Video Understanding with Large Language Model as Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10517/) (2024)
- [Long-CLIP: Unlocking the Long-Text Capability of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15378/) (2024)
- [VTimeLLM: Empower LLM to Grasp Video Moments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18445/) (2023)
- [VideoTree: Adaptive Tree-based Video Representation for LLM Reasoning on Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19209/) (2024)
- [MA-LMM: Memory-Augmented Large Multimodal Model for Long-Term Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05726/) (2024)
- [LightMem: Lightweight and Efficient Memory-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18866/) (2025)
- [Memory OS of AI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06326/) (2025)
- [Video-RAG: Visually-aligned Retrieval-Augmented Long Video Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13093/) (2024)
- [Qwen3-ASR Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21337/) (2026)
- [Streaming Video Question-Answering with In-context Video KV-Cache Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00540/) (2025)
- [M-LLM Based Video Frame Selection for Efficient Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19680/) (2025)
- [Q-Frame: Query-aware Frame Selection and Multi-Resolution Adaptation for Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22139/) (2025)
- [BOLT: Boost Large Vision-Language Model Without Training for Long-form Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21483/) (2025)
- [PruneVid: Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Video Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16117/) (2024)
- [AdaReTaKe: Adaptive Redundancy Reduction to Perceive Longer for Video-language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12559/) (2025)
- [Grounded Multi-Hop VideoQA in Long-Form Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14469/) (2024)
- [Generative Frame Sampler for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09146/) (2025)
- [VideoINSTA: Zero-shot Long Video Understanding via Informative Spatial-Temporal Reasoning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20365/) (2024)
- [BIMBA: Selective-Scan Compression for Long-Range Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09590/) (2025)
- [Keyframe-oriented Vision Token Pruning: Enhancing Efficiency of Large Vision Language Models on Long-Form Video Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10742/) (2025)
- [ReWind: Understanding Long Videos with Instructed Learnable Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15556/) (2024)
- [ExpandR: Teaching Dense Retrievers Beyond Queries with LLM Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17057/) (2025)
- [Recurrent Attention-based Token Selection for Efficient Streaming Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17364/) (2025)
- [MetaMem: Evolving Meta-Memory for Knowledge Utilization through Self-Reflective Symbolic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11182/) (2026)

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

- [Ground, Cover, and Refine: Evidence-Centric Frame Selection for Long-Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01660/) (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)

Long-video question answering remains challenging for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), as answer-relevant evidence is often sparse, transient, and temporally dispersed across lengthy video contexts. Existing frame-centric approaches improve efficiency through uniform sampling, query-aware frame selection, visual-token compression, and adaptive resolution strategies. However, they still rely on isolated and fragmented frames as the fundamental evidence units, limiting VLMs' ability to effectively capture coherent event-level semantics. To address this limitation, we propose MemoryCard, a video-memory-based augmentation framework that organizes long videos into self-contained Memory Cards. Specifically, MemoryCard first performs a self-reading process over videos and aligned utterances to segment the video into semantically coherent units, each corresponding to a distinct topic or event. For each unit, it generates an event-level video gist and selects representative visual moments, which are then rendered into unified Memory Cards for retrieval and question answering. Experimental results demonstrate that MemoryCard consistently improves long-video QA performance under comparable visual-token budgets, achieving up to a 21.8% relative improvement in accuracy. All code is available at https://github.com/NEUIR/MemoryCard.