Write Once, Query Many: Evolving Compact Reusable Memory for Long Videos

Overview & Synopsis

Long videos often exceed the context capacity of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), while agentic search repeats costly video processing and grounding for each query. Reusable memory can amortize this cost, but must preserve information for questions unknown during construction. We propose Video-EMem, an evolvable video memory harness built on time-anchored perceptual observations. This representation combines compact free-form text with sparse images to preserve semantic content and complementary visual details across temporal scales, supporting temporal navigation without a fixed semantic schema. A Writer encodes each video once by consolidating overlapping multiscale observations, and a Reader retrieves and organizes evidence solely from the resulting memory. With the underlying models frozen, we evolve their workflows and operators using distinct feedback: query-independent source fidelity and coverage for the Writer, and QA failures in evidence localization and utilization for the Reader. Experiments support this separation for generalization beyond development queries, with our evolution strategy improving average accuracy by 7.2% over the unevolved harness. While reducing storage by about 99.86% on average relative to raw videos, Video-EMem improves Qwen3-VL-30B by an average of 2.6% across three long-video QA benchmarks over direct input of 2,048 frames. Using the same o3 answer model as the state-of-the-art agentic method, it improves average accuracy by 2.5% with lower per-query latency.