CyberV: Cybernetics for Test-time Scaling in Video Understanding
Authors: name: Jiahao Meng, name: Shuyang Sun, name: Yue Tan, name: Lu Qi, name: Yunhai Tong, name: Xiangtai Li, name: Longyin Wen
Organization: ByteDance

Current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) may struggle with
understanding long or complex videos due to computational demands at test time,
lack of robustness, and limited accuracy, primarily stemming from their
feed-forward processing nature. These limitations could be more severe for
models with fewer parameters. To address these limitations, we propose a novel
framework inspired by cybernetic principles, redesigning video MLLMs as
adaptive systems capable of self-monitoring, self-correction, and dynamic
resource allocation during inference. Our approach, CyberV, introduces a
cybernetic loop consisting of an MLLM Inference System, a Sensor, and a
Controller. Specifically, the sensor monitors forward processes of the MLLM and
collects intermediate interpretations, such as attention drift, then the
controller determines when and how to trigger self-correction and generate
feedback to guide the next round. This test-time adaptive scaling framework
enhances frozen MLLMs without requiring retraining or additional components.
Experiments demonstrate significant improvements: CyberV boosts Qwen2.5-VL-7B
by 8.3% and InternVL3-8B by 5.5% on VideoMMMU, surpassing the competitive
proprietary model GPT-4o. When applied to Qwen2.5-VL-72B, it yields a 10.0%
improvement, achieving performance even comparable to human experts.
Furthermore, our method demonstrates consistent gains on general-purpose
benchmarks, such as VideoMME and WorldSense, highlighting its effectiveness and
generalization capabilities in making MLLMs more robust and accurate for
dynamic video understanding. The code is released at
https://github.com/marinero4972/CyberV.