Logic-in-Frames: Dynamic Keyframe Search via Visual Semantic-Logical Verification for Long Video Understanding

Understanding long video content is a complex endeavor that often relies on densely sampled frame captions or end-to-end feature selectors, yet these techniques commonly overlook the logical relationships between textual queries and visual elements. In practice, computational constraints necessitate coarse frame subsampling, a challenge analogous to ``finding a needle in a haystack.'' To address this issue, we introduce a semantics-driven search framework that reformulates keyframe selection under the paradigm of Visual Semantic-Logical Search. Specifically, we systematically define four fundamental logical dependencies: 1) spatial co-occurrence, 2) temporal proximity, 3) attribute dependency, and 4) causal order. These relations dynamically update frame sampling distributions through an iterative refinement process, enabling context-aware identification of semantically critical frames tailored to specific query requirements. Our method establishes new SOTA performance on the manually annotated benchmark in key-frame selection metrics. Furthermore, when applied to downstream video question-answering tasks, the proposed approach demonstrates the best performance gains over existing methods on LongVideoBench and Video-MME, validating its effectiveness in bridging the logical gap between textual queries and visual-temporal reasoning. The code will be publicly available.

@article{guo2025_2503.13139,
  title={ Logic-in-Frames: Dynamic Keyframe Search via Visual Semantic-Logical Verification for Long Video Understanding },
  author={ Weiyu Guo and Ziyang Chen and Shaoguang Wang and Jianxiang He and Yijie Xu and Jinhui Ye and Ying Sun and Hui Xiong },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.13139},
  year={ 2025 }
}