Video Encoders Built on Image Representations

The design of a video encoder determines when frames begin to interact and which frame-specific visual evidence remains accessible to the language model. Native video pathways couple neighboring frames during visual encoding, whereas image pathways preserve independently computed frame representations but incur a much larger visual-token cost when all image tokens are forwarded. We ask a basic question: whether a compact video encoder can instead be built on image representations. To answer this question, we separate three operations that are often coupled: per-frame representation, cross-frame token allocation, and temporal interaction. A frozen image encoder first produces frame-specific candidates. A question-aware selector then allocates a fixed token budget across frames using relevance, diversity, and cross-frame correspondence, after which a lightweight learned refiner reads neighboring-frame context and writes residual updates only to the retained anchors. This preserves source positions and keeps the visual output at the fixed budget. Across 13 benchmarks and three vision-language backbones, the resulting pathway matches full-image aggregate performance while using only about 28%-35% of its visual tokens. Specifically, on Qwen3-VL-8B, it achieves a 13-benchmark macro-average of 62.75 with 1,535 visual tokens, compared with 62.58 for the full Image pathway at 4,424 tokens and 59.49 for native Conv3D at 2,212 tokens. On Qwen3-VL-32B, it reaches a 13-benchmark macro-average of 66.28, compared with 66.09 for Image, while providing a 2.16x end-to-end speedup. These results show that compact video encoding does not require early temporal mixing: frame-specific evidence can be preserved first, allocated jointly, and temporally contextualized after selection.