REEF: Relevance-Aware and Efficient LLM Adapter for Video Understanding

Integrating vision models into large language models (LLMs) has sparked significant interest in creating vision-language foundation models, especially for video understanding. Recent methods often utilize memory banks to handle untrimmed videos for video-level understanding. However, they typically compress visual memory using similarity-based greedy approaches, which can overlook the contextual importance of individual tokens. To address this, we introduce an efficient LLM adapter designed for video-level understanding of untrimmed videos that prioritizes the contextual relevance of spatio-temporal tokens. Our framework leverages scorer networks to selectively compress the visual memory bank and filter spatial tokens based on relevance, using a differentiable Top-K operator for end-to-end training. Across three key video-level understanding tasks— untrimmed video classification, video question answering, and video captioning—our method achieves competitive or superior results on four large-scale datasets while reducing computational overhead by up to 34%. Code is available at: https://github.com/fw-ic/REEF-VideoLLM/