Abstract: Methods, devices and computer-readable media for processing a compressed video to perform an inference task are disclosed. Processing the compressed video may include selecting a subset of frame encodings of the compressed video, or zero or more modalities (RGB, motion vectors, residuals) of a frame encoding, for further processing to perform the inference task. Pre-existing motion vector and/or residual information in frame encodings of the compressed video are leveraged to adaptively and efficiently perform the inference task. In some embodiments, the inference task is an action recognition task, such as a human action recognition task.