Despite the advancements of Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) in various tasks, they struggle with fine-grained temporal understanding, such as Dense Video Captioning (DVC). DVC is a complicated task of describing all events within a video while also temporally localizing them, which integrates multiple fine-grained tasks, including video segmentation, video captioning, and temporal video grounding. Previous VideoLLMs attempt to solve DVC in a single step, failing to utilize their reasoning capability. Moreover, previous training objectives for VideoLLMs do not fully reflect the evaluation metrics, therefore not providing supervision directly aligned to target tasks. To address such a problem, we propose a novel framework named VidChain comprised of Chain-of-Tasks (CoTasks) and Metric-based Direct Preference Optimization (M-DPO). CoTasks decompose a complex task into a sequence of sub-tasks, allowing VideoLLMs to leverage their reasoning capabilities more effectively. M-DPO aligns a VideoLLM with evaluation metrics, providing fine-grained supervision to each task that is well-aligned with metrics. Applied to two different VideoLLMs, VidChain consistently improves their fine-grained video understanding, thereby outperforming previous VideoLLMs on two different DVC benchmarks and also on the temporal video grounding task. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/mlvlab/VidChain}.
Weakly-Supervised Dense Video Captioning (WSDVC) aims to localize and describe all events of interest in a video without requiring annotations of event boundaries. This setting poses a great challenge in accurately locating the temporal location of event, as the relevant supervision is unavailable. Existing methods rely on explicit alignment constraints between event locations and captions, which involve complex event proposal procedures during both training and inference. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel implicit location-caption alignment paradigm by complementary masking, which simplifies the complex event proposal and localization process while maintaining effectiveness. Specifically, our model comprises two components: a dual-mode video captioning module and a mask generation module. The dual-mode video captioning module captures global event information and generates descriptive captions, while the mask generation module generates differentiable positive and negative masks for localizing the events. These masks enable the implicit alignment of event locations and captions by ensuring that captions generated from positively and negatively masked videos are complementary, thereby forming a complete video description. In this way, even under weak supervision, the event location and event caption can be aligned implicitly. Extensive experiments on the public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing weakly-supervised methods and achieves competitive results compared to fully-supervised methods.
Despite impressive advancements in video understanding, most efforts remain limited to coarse-grained or visual-only video tasks. However, real-world videos encompass omni-modal information (vision, audio, and speech) with a series of events forming a cohesive storyline. The lack of multi-modal video data with fine-grained event annotations and the high cost of manual labeling are major obstacles to comprehensive omni-modality video perception. To address this gap, we propose an automatic pipeline consisting of high-quality multi-modal video filtering, semantically coherent omni-modal event boundary detection, and cross-modal correlation-aware event captioning. In this way, we present LongVALE, the first-ever Vision-Audio-Language Event understanding benchmark comprising 105K omni-modal events with precise temporal boundaries and detailed relation-aware captions within 8.4K high-quality long videos. Further, we build a baseline that leverages LongVALE to enable video large language models (LLMs) for omni-modality fine-grained temporal video understanding for the first time. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and great potential of LongVALE in advancing comprehensive multi-modal video understanding.
Recent researches on video large language models (VideoLLM) predominantly focus on model architectures and training datasets, leaving the interaction format between the user and the model under-explored. In existing works, users often interact with VideoLLMs by using the entire video and a query as input, after which the model generates a response. This interaction format constrains the application of VideoLLMs in scenarios such as live-streaming comprehension where videos do not end and responses are required in a real-time manner, and also results in unsatisfactory performance on time-sensitive tasks that requires localizing video segments. In this paper, we focus on a video-text duet interaction format. This interaction format is characterized by the continuous playback of the video, and both the user and the model can insert their text messages at any position during the video playback. When a text message ends, the video continues to play, akin to the alternative of two performers in a duet. We construct MMDuetIT, a video-text training dataset designed to adapt VideoLLMs to video-text duet interaction format. We also introduce the Multi-Answer Grounded Video Question Answering (MAGQA) task to benchmark the real-time response ability of VideoLLMs. Trained on MMDuetIT, MMDuet demonstrates that adopting the video-text duet interaction format enables the model to achieve significant improvements in various time-sensitive tasks (76% CIDEr on YouCook2 dense video captioning, 90\% mAP on QVHighlights highlight detection and 25% [email omitted] on Charades-STA temporal video grounding) with minimal training efforts, and also enable VideoLLMs to reply in a real-time manner as the video plays. Code, data and demo are available at: https://github.com/yellow-binary-tree/MMDuet.
Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in coarse-grained video understanding, however, they struggle with fine-grained temporal grounding. In this paper, we introduce Grounded-VideoLLM, a novel Video-LLM adept at perceiving and reasoning over specific video moments in a fine-grained manner. We identify that current Video-LLMs have limitations for fine-grained video understanding since they lack effective temporal modeling and timestamp representation. In light of this, we sharpen our model by incorporating (1) an additional temporal stream to encode the relationships between frames and (2) discrete temporal tokens enriched with specific time knowledge to represent timestamps. To optimize the training of Grounded-VideoLLM, we employ a multi-stage training scheme, beginning with simple video-captioning tasks and progressively introducing video temporal grounding tasks of increasing complexity. To further enhance Grounded-VideoLLM's temporal reasoning capability, we also curate a grounded VideoQA dataset by an automatic annotation pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Grounded-VideoLLM not only excels in fine-grained grounding tasks such as temporal sentence grounding, dense video captioning, and grounded VideoQA, but also shows great potential as a versatile video assistant for general video understanding.
The SoccerNet 2024 challenges represent the fourth annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. These challenges aim to advance research across multiple themes in football, including broadcast video understanding, field understanding, and player understanding. This year, the challenges encompass four vision-based tasks. (1) Ball Action Spotting, focusing on precisely localizing when and which soccer actions related to the ball occur, (2) Dense Video Captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps, (3) Multi-View Foul Recognition, a novel task focusing on analyzing multiple viewpoints of a potential foul incident to classify whether a foul occurred and assess its severity, (4) Game State Reconstruction, another novel task focusing on reconstructing the game state from broadcast videos onto a 2D top-view map of the field. Detailed information about the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards can be found at https://www.soccer-net.org, with baselines and development kits available at https://github.com/SoccerNet.
Procedural video understanding is gaining attention in the vision and language community. Deep learning-based video analysis requires extensive data. Consequently, existing works often use web videos as training resources, making it challenging to query instructional contents from raw video observations. To address this issue, we propose a new dataset, COM Kitchens. The dataset consists of unedited overhead-view videos captured by smartphones, in which participants performed food preparation based on given recipes. Fixed-viewpoint video datasets often lack environmental diversity due to high camera setup costs. We used modern wide-angle smartphone lenses to cover cooking counters from sink to cooktop in an overhead view, capturing activity without in-person assistance. With this setup, we collected a diverse dataset by distributing smartphones to participants. With this dataset, we propose the novel video-to-text retrieval task Online Recipe Retrieval (OnRR) and new video captioning domain Dense Video Captioning on unedited Overhead-View videos (DVC-OV). Our experiments verified the capabilities and limitations of current web-video-based SOTA methods in handling these tasks.
Dense video captioning is the task that involves the detection and description of events within video sequences. While traditional approaches focus on offline solutions where the entire video of analysis is available for the captioning model, in this work we introduce a paradigm shift towards Live Video Captioning (LVC). In LVC, dense video captioning models must generate captions for video streams in an online manner, facing important constraints such as having to work with partial observations of the video, the need for temporal anticipation and, of course, ensuring ideally a real-time response. In this work we formally introduce the novel problem of LVC and propose new evaluation metrics tailored for the online scenario, demonstrating their superiority over traditional metrics. We also propose an LVC model integrating deformable transformers and temporal filtering to address the LVC new challenges. Experimental evaluations on the ActivityNet Captions dataset validate the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting its performance in LVC compared to state-of-the-art offline methods. Results of our model as well as an evaluation kit with the novel metrics integrated are made publicly available to encourage further research on LVC.
Building on the advances of language models, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have contributed significant improvements in video understanding. While the current video LMMs utilize advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), they rely on either image or video encoders to process visual inputs, each of which has its own limitations. Image encoders excel at capturing rich spatial details from frame sequences but lack explicit temporal context, which can be important in videos with intricate action sequences. On the other hand, video encoders provide temporal context but are often limited by computational constraints that lead to processing only sparse frames at lower resolutions, resulting in reduced contextual and spatial understanding. To this end, we introduce VideoGPT+, which combines the complementary benefits of the image encoder (for detailed spatial understanding) and the video encoder (for global temporal context modeling). The model processes videos by dividing them into smaller segments and applies an adaptive pooling strategy on features extracted by both image and video encoders. Our architecture showcases improved performance across multiple video benchmarks, including VCGBench, MVBench and Zero-shot question-answering. Further, we develop 112K video-instruction set using a novel semi-automatic annotation pipeline which further improves the model performance. Additionally, to comprehensively evaluate video LMMs, we present VCGBench-Diverse, covering 18 broad video categories such as lifestyle, sports, science, gaming, and surveillance videos. This benchmark with 4,354 question-answer pairs evaluates the generalization of existing LMMs on dense video captioning, spatial and temporal understanding, and complex reasoning, ensuring comprehensive assessment across diverse video types and dynamics. Code: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/VideoGPT-plus.
Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) strives to accurately pinpoint event timestamps in a specific video using linguistic queries, significantly impacting downstream tasks like video browsing and editing. Unlike traditional task-specific models, Video Large Language Models (video LLMs) can handle multiple tasks concurrently in a zero-shot manner. Consequently, exploring the application of video LLMs for VTG tasks has become a burgeoning research area. However, despite considerable advancements in video content understanding, video LLMs often struggle to accurately pinpoint timestamps within videos, limiting their effectiveness in VTG tasks. To address this, we introduce VTG-LLM, a model designed to enhance video LLMs' timestamp localization abilities. Our approach includes: (1) effectively integrating timestamp knowledge into visual tokens; (2) incorporating absolute-time tokens to manage timestamp knowledge without concept shifts; and (3) introducing a lightweight, high-performance, slot-based token compression technique designed to accommodate the demands of a large number of frames to be sampled for VTG tasks. Additionally, we present VTG-IT-120K, a collection of publicly available VTG datasets that we have re-annotated to improve upon low-quality annotations. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of VTG-LLM in comparison to other video LLM methods across a variety of VTG tasks.
Traffic video description and analysis have received much attention recently due to the growing demand for efficient and reliable urban surveillance systems. Most existing methods only focus on locating traffic event segments, which severely lack descriptive details related to the behaviour and context of all the subjects of interest in the events. In this paper, we present TrafficVLM, a novel multi-modal dense video captioning model for vehicle ego camera view. TrafficVLM models traffic video events at different levels of analysis, both spatially and temporally, and generates long fine-grained descriptions for the vehicle and pedestrian at different phases of the event. We also propose a conditional component for TrafficVLM to control the generation outputs and a multi-task fine-tuning paradigm to enhance TrafficVLM's learning capability. Experiments show that TrafficVLM performs well on both vehicle and overhead camera views. Our solution achieved outstanding results in Track 2 of the AI City Challenge 2024, ranking us third in the challenge standings. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/quangminhdinh/TrafficVLM.
This paper introduces our solution for Track 2 in AI City Challenge 2024. The task aims to solve traffic safety description and analysis with the dataset of Woven Traffic Safety (WTS), a real-world Pedestrian-Centric Traffic Video Dataset for Fine-grained Spatial-Temporal Understanding. Our solution mainly focuses on the following points: 1) To solve dense video captioning, we leverage the framework of dense video captioning with parallel decoding (PDVC) to model visual-language sequences and generate dense caption by chapters for video. 2) Our work leverages CLIP to extract visual features to more efficiently perform cross-modality training between visual and textual representations. 3) We conduct domain-specific model adaptation to mitigate domain shift problem that poses recognition challenge in video understanding. 4) Moreover, we leverage BDD-5K captioned videos to conduct knowledge transfer for better understanding WTS videos and more accurate captioning. Our solution has yielded on the test set, achieving 6th place in the competition. The open source code will be available at https://github.com/UCF-SST-Lab/AICity2024CVPRW
There has been significant attention to the research on dense video captioning, which aims to automatically localize and caption all events within untrimmed video. Several studies introduce methods by designing dense video captioning as a multitasking problem of event localization and event captioning to consider inter-task relations. However, addressing both tasks using only visual input is challenging due to the lack of semantic content. In this study, we address this by proposing a novel framework inspired by the cognitive information processing of humans. Our model utilizes external memory to incorporate prior knowledge. The memory retrieval method is proposed with cross-modal video-to-text matching. To effectively incorporate retrieved text features, the versatile encoder and the decoder with visual and textual cross-attention modules are designed. Comparative experiments have been conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed method on ActivityNet Captions and YouCook2 datasets. Experimental results show promising performance of our model without extensive pretraining from a large video dataset.
An ideal model for dense video captioning -- predicting captions localized temporally in a video -- should be able to handle long input videos, predict rich, detailed textual descriptions, and be able to produce outputs before processing the entire video. Current state-of-the-art models, however, process a fixed number of downsampled frames, and make a single full prediction after seeing the whole video. We propose a streaming dense video captioning model that consists of two novel components: First, we propose a new memory module, based on clustering incoming tokens, which can handle arbitrarily long videos as the memory is of a fixed size. Second, we develop a streaming decoding algorithm that enables our model to make predictions before the entire video has been processed. Our model achieves this streaming ability, and significantly improves the state-of-the-art on three dense video captioning benchmarks: ActivityNet, YouCook2 and ViTT. Our code is released at https://github.com/google-research/scenic.
The core of video understanding tasks, such as recognition, captioning, and tracking, is to automatically detect objects or actions in a video and analyze their temporal evolution. Despite sharing a common goal, different tasks often rely on distinct model architectures and annotation formats. In contrast, natural language processing benefits from a unified output space, i.e., text sequences, which simplifies the training of powerful foundational language models, such as GPT-3, with extensive training corpora. Inspired by this, we seek to unify the output space of video understanding tasks by using languages as labels and additionally introducing time and box tokens. In this way, a variety of video tasks could be formulated as video-grounded token generation. This enables us to address various types of video tasks, including classification (such as action recognition), captioning (covering clip captioning, video question answering, and dense video captioning), and localization tasks (such as visual object tracking) within a fully shared encoder-decoder architecture, following a generative framework. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate such a simple and straightforward idea is quite effective and can achieve state-of-the-art or competitive results on seven video benchmarks, providing a novel perspective for more universal video understanding. Code is available at https://github.com/wangjk666/OmniVid.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable text understanding capabilities, which have been extended as Video LLMs to handle video data for comprehending visual details. However, existing Video LLMs can only provide a coarse description of the entire video, failing to capture the precise start and end time boundary of specific events. In this paper, we solve this issue via proposing VTimeLLM, a novel Video LLM designed for fine-grained video moment understanding and reasoning with respect to time boundary. Specifically, our VTimeLLM adopts a boundary-aware three-stage training strategy, which respectively utilizes image-text pairs for feature alignment, multiple-event videos to increase temporal-boundary awareness, and high-quality video-instruction tuning to further improve temporal understanding ability as well as align with human intents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that in fine-grained time-related comprehension tasks for videos such as Temporal Video Grounding and Dense Video Captioning, VTimeLLM significantly outperforms existing Video LLMs. Besides, benefits from the fine-grained temporal understanding of the videos further enable VTimeLLM to beat existing Video LLMs in video dialogue benchmark, showing its superior cross-modal understanding and reasoning abilities.
The SoccerNet 2023 challenges were the third annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. For this third edition, the challenges were composed of seven vision-based tasks split into three main themes. The first theme, broadcast video understanding, is composed of three high-level tasks related to describing events occurring in the video broadcasts: (1) action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to global actions in soccer, (2) ball action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to the soccer ball change of state, and (3) dense video captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps. The second theme, field understanding, relates to the single task of (4) camera calibration, focusing on retrieving the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters from images. The third and last theme, player understanding, is composed of three low-level tasks related to extracting information about the players: (5) re-identification, focusing on retrieving the same players across multiple views, (6) multiple object tracking, focusing on tracking players and the ball through unedited video streams, and (7) jersey number recognition, focusing on recognizing the jersey number of players from tracklets. Compared to the previous editions of the SoccerNet challenges, tasks (2-3-7) are novel, including new annotations and data, task (4) was enhanced with more data and annotations, and task (6) now focuses on end-to-end approaches. More information on the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards are available on https://www.soccer-net.org. Baselines and development kits can be found on https://github.com/SoccerNet.
Humans can naturally reason from superficial state differences (e.g. ground wetness) to transformations descriptions (e.g. raining) according to their life experience. In this paper, we propose a new visual reasoning task to test this transformation reasoning ability in real-world scenarios, called \textbf{V}isual \textbf{T}ransformation \textbf{T}elling (VTT). Given a series of states (i.e. images), VTT requires to describe the transformation occurring between every two adjacent states. Different from existing visual reasoning tasks that focus on surface state reasoning, the advantage of VTT is that it captures the underlying causes, e.g. actions or events, behind the differences among states. We collect a novel dataset to support the study of transformation reasoning from two existing instructional video datasets, CrossTask and COIN, comprising 13,547 samples. Each sample involves the key state images along with their transformation descriptions. Our dataset covers diverse real-world activities, providing a rich resource for training and evaluation. To construct an initial benchmark for VTT, we test several models, including traditional visual storytelling methods (CST, GLACNet, Densecap) and advanced multimodal large language models (LLaVA v1.5-7B, Qwen-VL-chat, Gemini Pro Vision, GPT-4o, and GPT-4). Experimental results reveal that even state-of-the-art models still face challenges in VTT, highlighting substantial areas for improvement.
Joint video-language learning has received increasing attention in recent years. However, existing works mainly focus on single or multiple trimmed video clips (events), which makes human-annotated event boundaries necessary during inference. To break away from the ties, we propose a grounded vision-language learning framework for untrimmed videos, which automatically detects informative events and effectively excavates the alignments between multi-sentence descriptions and corresponding event segments. Instead of coarse-level video-language alignments, we present two dual pretext tasks to encourage fine-grained segment-level alignments, i.e., text-to-event grounding (TEG) and event-to-text generation (ETG). TEG learns to adaptively ground the possible event proposals given a set of sentences by estimating the cross-modal distance in a joint semantic space. Meanwhile, ETG aims to reconstruct (generate) the matched texts given event proposals, encouraging the event representation to retain meaningful semantic information. To encourage accurate label assignment between the event set and the text set, we propose a novel semantic-aware cost to mitigate the sub-optimal matching results caused by ambiguous boundary annotations. Our framework is easily extensible to tasks covering visually-grounded language understanding and generation. We achieve state-of-the-art dense video captioning performance on ActivityNet Captions, YouCook2 and YouMakeup, and competitive performance on several other language generation and understanding tasks. Our method also achieved 1st place in both the MTVG and MDVC tasks of the PIC 4th Challenge. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zjr2000/GVL.
In this work, we introduce Vid2Seq, a multi-modal single-stage dense event captioning model pretrained on narrated videos which are readily-available at scale. The Vid2Seq architecture augments a language model with special time tokens, allowing it to seamlessly predict event boundaries and textual descriptions in the same output sequence. Such a unified model requires large-scale training data, which is not available in current annotated datasets. We show that it is possible to leverage unlabeled narrated videos for dense video captioning, by reformulating sentence boundaries of transcribed speech as pseudo event boundaries, and using the transcribed speech sentences as pseudo event captions. The resulting Vid2Seq model pretrained on the YT-Temporal-1B dataset improves the state of the art on a variety of dense video captioning benchmarks including YouCook2, ViTT and ActivityNet Captions. Vid2Seq also generalizes well to the tasks of video paragraph captioning and video clip captioning, and to few-shot settings. Our code is publicly available at https://antoyang.github.io/vid2seq.html.