AVA: Towards Agentic Video Analytics with Vision Language Models

AI-driven video analytics has become increasingly important across diverse domains. However, existing systems are often constrained to specific, predefined tasks, limiting their adaptability in open-ended analytical scenarios. The recent emergence of Vision Language Models (VLMs) as transformative technologies offers significant potential for enabling open-ended video understanding, reasoning, and analytics. Nevertheless, their limited context windows present challenges when processing ultra-long video content, which is prevalent in real-world applications. To address this, we introduce AVA, a VLM-powered system designed for open-ended, advanced video analytics. AVA incorporates two key innovations: (1) the near real-time construction of Event Knowledge Graphs (EKGs) for efficient indexing of long or continuous video streams, and (2) an agentic retrieval-generation mechanism that leverages EKGs to handle complex and diverse queries. Comprehensive evaluations on public benchmarks, LVBench and VideoMME-Long, demonstrate that AVA achieves state-of-the-art performance, attaining 62.3% and 64.1% accuracy, respectively-significantly surpassing existing VLM and video Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Furthermore, to evaluate video analytics in ultra-long and open-world video scenarios, we introduce a new benchmark, AVA-100. This benchmark comprises 8 videos, each exceeding 10 hours in duration, along with 120 manually annotated, diverse, and complex question-answer pairs. On AVA-100, AVA achieves top-tier performance with an accuracy of 75.8%. The source code of AVA is available at https://github.com/I-ESC/Project-Ava. The AVA-100 benchmark can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/datasets/iesc/Ava-100.