Title: Video Parallel Scaling: Aggregating Diverse Frame Subsets for VideoLLMs
Primary area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
Keywords: VideoLLM, Scaling Law, Parallel Scaling, Multimodal Understanding

Abstract: Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) face a critical bottleneck: increasing the number of input frames to capture fine-grained temporal detail leads to prohibitive computational costs and performance degradation from long context lengths. We introduce Video Parallel Scaling (VPS), an inference-time method that expands a model's perceptual bandwidth without increasing its context window. VPS operates by running multiple parallel inference streams, each processing a unique, disjoint subset of the video's frames. By aggregating the output probabilities from these complementary streams, VPS integrates a richer set of visual information than is possible with a single pass. We theoretically show that this approach effectively contracts the Chinchilla scaling law by leveraging uncorrelated visual evidence, thereby improving performance without additional training. Extensive experiments across various model architectures and scales (2B-32B) on benchmarks such as Video-MME and EventHallusion demonstrate that VPS consistently and significantly improves performance. It scales more favorably than other parallel alternatives (e.g. Self-consistency) and is complementary to other decoding strategies, offering a memory-efficient and robust framework for enhancing the temporal reasoning capabilities of VideoLLMs.

TL;DR: Running several parallel inference streams on disjoint frame subsets and aggregating their output probabilities results in enhanced video understanding capabilities