Apollo: An Exploration of Video Understanding in Large Multimodal Models

Despite the rapid integration of video perception capabilities into Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs), what drives their video perception remains poorly understood.Consequently, many design decisions in this domain are made without proper justification or analysis. The high computational cost of training and evaluating such models, coupled with limited open research, hinders the development of video-LMMs. To address this, we present a comprehensive study that uncovers what effectively drives video understanding in LMMs.We begin by critically examining the primary contributors to the high computational requirements associated with video-LMM research and discover *Scaling Consistency*, wherein design and training decisions made on smaller models and datasets (up to a critical size) effectively transfer to larger models. Leveraging these insights, we explored many video-specific aspects of video-LMMs, including video sampling, architectures, data composition, training schedules, and more.Guided by these findings, we introduce **Apollo**, a state-of-the-art family of LMMs that achieve superior performance across different model sizes. Our models process over $1$-hour videos efficiently, with the $3$B parameter variant outperforming most existing $7$B models. **Apollo**-$7$B is state-of-the-art compared to 7B LMMs with a $70.9$ on MLVU, and $63.3$ on Video-MME. Our code and models will be made available at publication.