How Well Can Your Video Model Remember? Measuring Memory-Budget Trade-offs in Long Video Understanding

We introduce a compact empirical model that quantifies how answer accuracy degrades as a function of frame budget B and temporal distance D in long video understanding -- analyzing performance when recalling content from D seconds in the past using a fraction B of total frames. Long-form models operate under strict budgets, yet no prior framework predicts how accuracy degrades as B shrinks and events recede. We fit a weighted least-squares model on ~155,000 binary predictions across ten models and three sampling strategies, deriving a law where logit-accuracy scales linearly in log-budget with a distance-dependent exponent that decays log-linearly with distance. This budget exponent α(D) captures the marginal value of extra frames at distance D. The law achieves cell-level weighted R2 = 0.05-0.75 across models. Notably, budget effectiveness at D = 1000 s differs by ≈ 7.4× between the best streaming and base models. STREAMINGVLM achieves α(1000) = 1.26 (95% CI: [1.06, 1.58]), meaning a tenfold budget increase substantially improves long-distance accuracy, while the best Qwen3-VL base model reaches only α(1000) = 0.17 (CI: [0.04, 0.34]). In accuracy space, a 10× budget increase at D = 1000 s yields +29 percentage points for STREAMINGVLM versus +4 pp for the base model. Sampling strategies show model-dependent trade-offs: random sampling yields higher base sensitivity but steeper distance decay. We demonstrate how α(D) enables principled budget allocation, including a model-ranking reversal at long distance, and propose it as a diagnostic metric for streaming video models.