Bridging the Grounding Gap in VideoQA via Typed Memory for Language-based Belief-State Reasoning

Abstract

VideoQA models can be accurate yet often fail to align answers with the correct video segments (the \emph{grounding gap}). We introduce \textbf{LINGUA} (\textbf{L}anguage-based \textbf{IN}ference for \textbf{G}rounded Video \textbf{U}nderstanding \textbf{A}gent), a memory-based agent that performs grounded VideoQA by reasoning in an explicit \emph{linguistic belief state}. LINGUA uses five mechanisms: (1) event-driven perception (retains 8--12\% of frames while preserving 94\% of question-relevant events); (2) typed memory for episodic narratives, semantic affordances, and procedural scripts; (3) Belief-Action-Verification loops with postcondition and temporal checks; (4) meta reflection with contrastive refinement; and (5) Bayesian reliability tracking for continual learning without gradient updates. Built with Gemma3-4B (Ollama, 4-bit), LINGUA outperforms strong baselines on five VideoQA benchmarks, reaching 82.4\% on NExT-QA and 42.3\% Acc@GQA on NExT-GQA (answer + IoU$\geq$0.5 temporal localization), while running 2.6$\times$ faster than dense-frame methods. In continual learning over 100 videos, accuracy rises from 45.2\% (first 10) to 61.8\% (last 10) without catastrophic forgetting, indicating online adaptation via memory refinement.