Memory Consolidation Enables Long-Context Video Understanding

Ivana Balavzevi'c, Yuge Shi, Pinelopi Papalampidi, R. Chaabouni, Skanda Koppula +1 more
2/12/2026

No official code found. Best implementation: kyegomez/MC-ViT (27 stars, MIT, last commit 2026-04-13).

Abstract

Most transformer-based video encoders are limited to short temporal contexts due to their quadratic complexity. While various attempts have been made to extend this context, this has often come at the cost of both conceptual and computational complexity. We propose to instead re-purpose existing pre-trained video transformers by simply fine-tuning them to attend to memories derived non-parametrically from past activations. By leveraging redundancy reduction, our memory-consolidated vision transformer (MC-ViT) effortlessly extends its context far into the past and exhibits excellent scaling behavior when learning from longer videos. In doing so, MC-ViT sets a new state-of-the-art in long-context video understanding on EgoSchema, Perception Test, and Diving48, outperforming methods that benefit from orders of magnitude more parameters.

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Code Implementations(1)

kyegomez/MC-ViTCommunity69%
MIT

Implementation of the model: "(MC-ViT)" from the paper: "Memory Consolidation Enables Long-Context Video Understanding"

271Shell, PythonFeb 9, 20246 months agoMIT
aimulti-modalmulti-modal-transformersmulti-modalityopen-source+3 more

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Cite this paper

@article{balavzevic2026memory,
  title  = {Memory Consolidation Enables Long-Context Video Understanding},
  author = {Ivana Balavzevi'c and Yuge Shi and Pinelopi Papalampidi and R. Chaabouni and Skanda Koppula and Olivier J. H'enaff},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2402.05861},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05861},
  journal = {ICML 2024 2024}
}

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