MetaSampling: Making Frame Samplers Efficient for Long-Video Question Answering

Frame selection is an important component of long-video question answering (VQA) with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Existing frame-selection methods improve over simple top-k embedding retrieval and uniform sampling, but are typically applied under a fixed global selection budget. We introduce MetaSampling, a training-free, plug-and-play sampling strategy that can be applied on top of existing frame selectors. MetaSampling improves downstream VQA efficiency by dynamically reducing the number of frames passed to the MLLM while preserving, and in some cases improving, answer accuracy. We evaluate MetaSampling across 36 paired frame-selector--MLLM-backbone--VQA-benchmark configurations. MetaSampling reduces the number of selected frames in all 36 configurations and improves accuracy in 25 of them, yielding an average frame reduction of 8.9% while slightly improving accuracy overall.