Abstract
Current vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse video understanding applications. Designing VLMs for video inputs requires effectively modeling the temporal dimension (i.e. capturing dependencies across frames) and balancing the processing of short and long videos. Specifically, short videos demand preservation of fine-grained details, whereas long videos require strategic compression of visual information to handle extensive temporal contexts efficiently. However, our empirical analysis reveals a critical limitation: most existing VLMs suffer severe performance degradation in long video understanding tasks when compressing visual tokens below a quarter of their original visual tokens. To enable more effective modeling of both short and long video inputs, we propose Clapper, a method that utilizes a slow-fast strategy for video representation and introduces a novel module named TimePerceiver for efficient temporal-spatial encoding within e