# MLVU: Benchmarking Multi-task Long Video Understanding

Source: [MLVU: Benchmarking Multi-task Long Video Understanding](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa766a1e209131cea6cd28>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-01-02T13:43:11.824Z

Authors: Junjie Zhou, Yan Shu, Bo Zhao, Boya Wu, Zhengyang Liang, Shitao Xiao, Minghao Qin, Xi Yang, Yongping Xiong, Bo Zhang, Tiejun Huang, Zheng Liu

Published: 2024-06-06T17:09:32.000Z

## Abstract

The evaluation of Long Video Understanding (LVU) performance poses an important but challenging research problem. Despite previous efforts, the existing video understanding benchmarks are severely constrained by several issues, especially the insufficient lengths of videos, a lack of diversity in video types and evaluation tasks, and the inappropriateness for evaluating LVU performances. To address the above problems, we propose a new benchmark called MLVU (Multi-task Long Video Understanding Benchmark) for the comprehensive and in-depth evaluation of LVU. MLVU presents the following critical values: \\textit{1)} The substantial and flexible extension of video lengths, which enables the benchmark to evaluate LVU performance across a wide range of durations. \\textit{2)} The inclusion of various video genres, e.g., movies, surveillance footage, egocentric videos, cartoons, game videos, etc., which reflects the models' LVU performances in different scenarios. \\textit{3)} The development of diversified evaluation tasks, which enables a comprehensive examination of MLLMs' key abilities in long-video understanding. The empirical study with 23 latest MLLMs reveals significant room for improvement in today's technique, as all existing methods struggle with most of the evaluation tasks and exhibit severe performance degradation when handling longer videos. Additionally, it suggests that factors such as context length, image-understanding ability, and the choice of LLM backbone can play critical roles in future advancements. We anticipate that MLVU will advance the research of long video understanding by providing a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of MLLMs.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Video Summarization Metric Evaluation on MLVU VS Eval](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/video-summarization-metric-evaluation-on-mlvu-vs-eval.md>): Video Summarization Metric Evaluation; MLVU VS Eval; Kendall's tau\_b: 0.5284.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04264>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.04264.pdf>)

[Implementation](<https://github.com/JUNJIE99/MLVU>)