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arxiv: 2605.05640 · v1 · submitted 2026-05-07 · 💻 cs.CV

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AffectSeek: Agentic Affective Understanding in Long Videos under Vague User Queries

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Pith reviewed 2026-05-08 14:54 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.CV
keywords affective understandinglong video analysisvague queriesagentic frameworkemotion localizationvideo benchmarkmulti-step reasoningrationale generation
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The pith

AffectSeek uses five staged steps to locate and explain emotions in long videos from vague user queries.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper shifts affective understanding away from pre-clipped short videos or images toward real-world long videos where users pose vague natural-language questions. It defines the VQAU task, which requires localizing affective moments, classifying their emotions, and generating evidence-based rationales. To solve the multi-step challenges, the authors build VQAU-Bench for unified testing and introduce AffectSeek, an agentic system that decomposes the work into intent interpretation, candidate localization, clip verification, emotion reasoning, and rationale generation. Specialized roles and cross-stage checks let the system progressively match vague intent to temporal evidence. A sympathetic reader would care because everyday video interaction involves long, unsegmented content and imprecise queries that current passive models cannot handle.

Core claim

The paper claims that vague-query-driven video affective understanding remains unsolved by existing affective recognition models and single-step vision-language models, and that AffectSeek solves it by decomposing the task into intent interpretation, candidate localization, clip verification, emotion reasoning, and rationale generation, then progressively aligning vague user intent with long-video evidence through role-specialized reasoning and cross-stage verification.

What carries the argument

The five-stage decomposition of intent interpretation, candidate localization, clip verification, emotion reasoning, and rationale generation, together with role-specialized reasoning and cross-stage verification.

If this is right

  • VQAU-Bench enables systematic measurement of semantic-temporal-affective alignment, moment localization, emotion classification, and rationale generation.
  • Existing affective recognition models and single-step vision-language models perform poorly on the VQAU task.
  • AffectSeek supplies a simple, effective framework that improves agentic handling of long-video affective queries.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The staged verification approach could apply to other video tasks that start from vague instructions, such as action or event localization.
  • Breaking queries into verifiable stages may lower error accumulation in any multi-step video reasoning pipeline.
  • Interactive video systems could adopt similar decomposition to support real-time user clarifications during affective searches.

Load-bearing premise

The five-stage process with role-specialized reasoning and cross-stage verification will reliably align vague user intent to long-video affective evidence without introducing compounding errors.

What would settle it

If AffectSeek applied to VQAU-Bench produces no measurable gains in affective moment localization accuracy, emotion classification precision, or rationale quality over single-step vision-language models.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.05640 by Haifeng Lu, Runhao Zeng, Xiping Hu, Yuhang Yang, Yuhuan Lu, Yunxiang Jiang, Zheng Lian, Zhen Zhang.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: VQAU task-solving pipeline. Given a query and a full video as inputs, view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Illustration of partial dataset scenarios. Specifically, (a)–(f) show the view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Overview of the proposed annotation pipeline. The framework identifies affective event clips with temporal boundaries and emotion labels, generates view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Distribution of samples across emotion categories in the dataset. The view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Dataset-level statistics of the constructed benchmark. The four donut charts report the distributions of query length, reason explanation length, affective view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Overall workflow of AffectSeek framework. Given a vague query and a full video, the CoreAgent dynamically invokes the LocalizeAgent for temporal view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Visualization of representative prediction results. The comparison shows that AffectSeek effectively localizes affective event clips, identifies the view at source ↗
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: Ablation Study of Individual Tools in AffectSeek. The comparison view at source ↗
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: Ablation study on Each Agent in AffectSeek. The experimental view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Existing affective understanding studies have mainly focused on recognizing emotions from images, audio signals, or pre-cliped video clips, where the affective evidence is already given. This passive and clip-centered setting does not fully reflect real-world scenarios, in which users often interact with long videos and express their needs through natural-language queries. In this paper, we study \textbf{Vague-Query-driven video Affective Understanding (VQAU)}, a new task that requires models to localize affective moments in long videos, predict their emotion categories, and generate evidence-grounded rationales under vague user queries. To support this task, we construct \textbf{VQAU-Bench}, a benchmark that integrates long videos, vague affective queries, temporal clip annotations, emotion labels, and rationale explanations into a unified evaluation framework. VQAU-Bench enables systematic assessment of semantic-temporal-affective alignment, affective moment localization, emotion classification, and rationale generation. To address the multi-step reasoning challenges of VQAU, we further propose \textbf{AffectSeek}, an agentic framework that actively seeks, verifies, and explains affective moments in long videos. AffectSeek decomposes VQAU into intent interpretation, candidate localization, clip verification, emotion reasoning, and rationale generation, and progressively aligns vague user intent with long-video evidence through role-specialized reasoning and cross-stage verification. Experiments show that VQAU remains challenging for existing affective recognition models and single-step vision-language models, while AffectSeek provides a simple yet effective framework for agentic long-video affective understanding.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

0 major / 3 minor

Summary. The paper introduces Vague-Query-driven video Affective Understanding (VQAU) as a new task requiring localization of affective moments in long videos, emotion category prediction, and evidence-grounded rationale generation from vague natural-language queries. It constructs VQAU-Bench, a unified benchmark combining long videos, vague affective queries, temporal clip annotations, emotion labels, and rationale explanations to evaluate semantic-temporal-affective alignment. The proposed AffectSeek framework decomposes the task into five stages—intent interpretation, candidate localization, clip verification, emotion reasoning, and rationale generation—employing role-specialized agents and cross-stage verification to progressively align vague user intent with long-video evidence. Experiments indicate that existing affective recognition models and single-step vision-language models struggle on VQAU, while AffectSeek offers an effective agentic solution.

Significance. If the experimental results and ablations hold, this work meaningfully extends affective understanding beyond passive, pre-clipped settings to realistic interactive long-video scenarios with vague queries. The VQAU-Bench benchmark enables systematic, multi-dimensional evaluation that was previously unavailable, and the five-stage agentic decomposition with verification provides a concrete, reproducible template for handling multi-step reasoning in video-language tasks. These contributions could influence agentic frameworks in computer vision and multimodal AI.

minor comments (3)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract: the statement that 'AffectSeek provides a simple yet effective framework' would benefit from a brief quantitative highlight (e.g., improvement margins on key metrics) to substantiate the effectiveness claim without requiring the reader to reach the experiments section.
  2. The operational definition of 'vague' queries and the criteria used to generate or select them in VQAU-Bench should be stated more explicitly (e.g., ambiguity level, lexical features, or annotation protocol) to support reproducibility and future extensions.
  3. Ensure all stage-specific prompts or role instructions for the specialized agents are either included in the main text or clearly referenced to an appendix so that the cross-stage verification mechanism can be exactly replicated.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

0 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the positive and constructive review. We are pleased that the referee recognizes the novelty of the VQAU task, the utility of VQAU-Bench, and the practical value of the five-stage agentic decomposition in AffectSeek for handling vague queries in long videos.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity; empirical agentic pipeline with no derivations

full rationale

The paper defines a new task (VQAU) and proposes AffectSeek as a five-stage agentic framework (intent interpretation, candidate localization, clip verification, emotion reasoning, rationale generation) with role-specialized agents and cross-stage verification. No equations, fitted parameters, predictions, or first-principles derivations are present that could reduce to their own inputs by construction. The benchmark VQAU-Bench is constructed to support evaluation, and claims rest on experimental results rather than self-referential definitions or self-citation chains. This is a standard empirical proposal of a pipeline, self-contained against external benchmarks.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 0 axioms · 0 invented entities

Abstract-only view reveals no explicit free parameters, mathematical axioms, or newly postulated entities; the work relies on standard assumptions in computer vision, NLP, and agentic systems.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5596 in / 1182 out tokens · 38244 ms · 2026-05-08T14:54:41.977677+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

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