In this work, we introduce the task of script-driven video summarization, which aims to produce a summary of the full-length video by selecting the parts that are most relevant to a user-provided script outlining the visual content of the desired summary. Following, we extend a recently-introduced large-scale dataset for generic video summarization (VideoXum) by producing natural language descriptions of the different human-annotated summaries that are available per video. In this way we make it compatible with the introduced task, since the available triplets of ``video, summary and summary description'' can be used for training a method that is able to produce different summaries for a given video, driven by the provided script about the content of each summary. Finally, we develop a new network architecture for script-driven video summarization (SD-VSum), that relies on the use of a cross-modal attention mechanism for aligning and fusing information from the visual and text modalities. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate the advanced performance of SD-VSum against state-of-the-art approaches for query-driven and generic (unimodal and multimodal) summarization from the literature, and document its capacity to produce video summaries that are adapted to each user's needs about their content.
We present Vinci, a vision-language system designed to provide real-time, comprehensive AI assistance on portable devices. At its core, Vinci leverages EgoVideo-VL, a novel model that integrates an egocentric vision foundation model with a large language model (LLM), enabling advanced functionalities such as scene understanding, temporal grounding, video summarization, and future planning. To enhance its utility, Vinci incorporates a memory module for processing long video streams in real time while retaining contextual history, a generation module for producing visual action demonstrations, and a retrieval module that bridges egocentric and third-person perspectives to provide relevant how-to videos for skill acquisition. Unlike existing systems that often depend on specialized hardware, Vinci is hardware-agnostic, supporting deployment across a wide range of devices, including smartphones and wearable cameras. In our experiments, we first demonstrate the superior performance of EgoVideo-VL on multiple public benchmarks, showcasing its vision-language reasoning and contextual understanding capabilities. We then conduct a series of user studies to evaluate the real-world effectiveness of Vinci, highlighting its adaptability and usability in diverse scenarios. We hope Vinci can establish a new framework for portable, real-time egocentric AI systems, empowering users with contextual and actionable insights. Including the frontend, backend, and models, all codes of Vinci are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/vinci.
Transforming recorded videos into concise and accurate textual summaries is a growing challenge in multimodal learning. This paper introduces VISTA, a dataset specifically designed for video-to-text summarization in scientific domains. VISTA contains 18,599 recorded AI conference presentations paired with their corresponding paper abstracts. We benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art large models and apply a plan-based framework to better capture the structured nature of abstracts. Both human and automated evaluations confirm that explicit planning enhances summary quality and factual consistency. However, a considerable gap remains between models and human performance, highlighting the challenges of scientific video summarization.
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized video-based computer vision applications, including action recognition, anomaly detection, and video summarization. Videos inherently pose unique challenges, combining spatial complexity with temporal dynamics that are absent in static images or textual data. Current approaches to video understanding with LLMs often rely on pretrained video encoders to extract spatiotemporal features and text encoders to capture semantic meaning. These representations are integrated within LLM frameworks, enabling multimodal reasoning across diverse video tasks. However, the critical question persists: Can LLMs truly understand the concept of time, and how effectively can they reason about temporal relationships in videos? This work critically examines the role of LLMs in video processing, with a specific focus on their temporal reasoning capabilities. We identify key limitations in the interaction between LLMs and pretrained encoders, revealing gaps in their ability to model long-term dependencies and abstract temporal concepts such as causality and event progression. Furthermore, we analyze challenges posed by existing video datasets, including biases, lack of temporal annotations, and domain-specific limitations that constrain the temporal understanding of LLMs. To address these gaps, we explore promising future directions, including the co-evolution of LLMs and encoders, the development of enriched datasets with explicit temporal labels, and innovative architectures for integrating spatial, temporal, and semantic reasoning. By addressing these challenges, we aim to advance the temporal comprehension of LLMs, unlocking their full potential in video analysis and beyond.
The demand for producing short-form videos for sharing on social media platforms has experienced significant growth in recent times. Despite notable advancements in the fields of video summarization and highlight detection, which can create partially usable short films from raw videos, these approaches are often domain-specific and require an in-depth understanding of real-world video content. To tackle this predicament, we propose Repurpose-10K, an extensive dataset comprising over 10,000 videos with more than 120,000 annotated clips aimed at resolving the video long-to-short task. Recognizing the inherent constraints posed by untrained human annotators, which can result in inaccurate annotations for repurposed videos, we propose a two-stage solution to obtain annotations from real-world user-generated content. Furthermore, we offer a baseline model to address this challenging task by integrating audio, visual, and caption aspects through a cross-modal fusion and alignment framework. We aspire for our work to ignite groundbreaking research in the lesser-explored realms of video repurposing.
An important aspect of summarizing videos is understanding the temporal context behind each part of the video to grasp what is and is not important. Video summarization models have in recent years modeled spatio-temporal relationships to represent this information. These models achieved state-of-the-art correlation scores on important benchmark datasets. However, what has not been reviewed is whether spatio-temporal relationships are even required to achieve state-of-the-art results. Previous work in activity recognition has found biases, by prioritizing static cues such as scenes or objects, over motion information. In this paper we inquire if similar spurious relationships might influence the task of video summarization. To do so, we analyse the role that temporal information plays on existing benchmark datasets. We first estimate a baseline with temporally invariant models to see how well such models rank on benchmark datasets (TVSum and SumMe). We then disrupt the temporal order of the videos to investigate the impact it has on existing state-of-the-art models. One of our findings is that the temporally invariant models achieve competitive correlation scores that are close to the human baselines on the TVSum dataset. We also demonstrate that existing models are not affected by temporal perturbations. Furthermore, with certain disruption strategies that shuffle fixed time segments, we can actually improve their correlation scores. With these results, we find that spatio-temporal relationship play a minor role and we raise the question whether these benchmarks adequately model the task of video summarization. Code available at: https://github.com/AashGan/TemporalPerturbSum
Long video understanding poses a significant challenge for current Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Notably, the MLLMs are constrained by their limited context lengths and the substantial costs while processing long videos. Although several existing methods attempt to reduce visual tokens, their strategies encounter severe bottleneck, restricting MLLMs' ability to perceive fine-grained visual details. In this work, we propose Video-XL, a novel approach that leverages MLLMs' inherent key-value (KV) sparsification capacity to condense the visual input. Specifically, we introduce a new special token, the Visual Summarization Token (VST), for each interval of the video, which summarizes the visual information within the interval as its associated KV. The VST module is trained by instruction fine-tuning, where two optimizing strategies are offered. 1.Curriculum learning, where VST learns to make small (easy) and large compression (hard) progressively. 2. Composite data curation, which integrates single-image, multi-image, and synthetic data to overcome the scarcity of long-video instruction data. The compression quality is further improved by dynamic compression, which customizes compression granularity based on the information density of different video intervals. Video-XL's effectiveness is verified from three aspects. First, it achieves a superior long-video understanding capability, outperforming state-of-the-art models of comparable sizes across multiple popular benchmarks. Second, it effectively preserves video information, with minimal compression loss even at 16x compression ratio. Third, it realizes outstanding cost-effectiveness, enabling high-quality processing of thousands of frames on a single A100 GPU.
With the surge in the amount of video data, video summarization techniques, including visual-modal(VM) and textual-modal(TM) summarization, are attracting more and more attention. However, unimodal summarization inevitably loses the rich semantics of the video. In this paper, we focus on a more comprehensive video summarization task named Bimodal Semantic Summarization of Videos (BiSSV). Specifically, we first construct a large-scale dataset, BIDS, in (video, VM-Summary, TM-Summary) triplet format. Unlike traditional processing methods, our construction procedure contains a VM-Summary extraction algorithm aiming to preserve the most salient content within long videos. Based on BIDS, we propose a Unified framework UBiSS for the BiSSV task, which models the saliency information in the video and generates a TM-summary and VM-summary simultaneously. We further optimize our model with a list-wise ranking-based objective to improve its capacity to capture highlights. Lastly, we propose a metric, $NDCG_{MS}$, to provide a joint evaluation of the bimodal summary. Experiments show that our unified framework achieves better performance than multi-stage summarization pipelines. Code and data are available at https://github.com/MeiYutingg/UBiSS.
In this paper we introduce a new dataset for 360-degree video summarization: the transformation of 360-degree video content to concise 2D-video summaries that can be consumed via traditional devices, such as TV sets and smartphones. The dataset includes ground-truth human-generated summaries, that can be used for training and objectively evaluating 360-degree video summarization methods. Using this dataset, we train and assess two state-of-the-art summarization methods that were originally proposed for 2D-video summarization, to serve as a baseline for future comparisons with summarization methods that are specifically tailored to 360-degree video. Finally, we present an interactive tool that was developed to facilitate the data annotation process and can assist other annotation activities that rely on video fragment selection.
Video is an increasingly prominent and information-dense medium, yet it poses substantial challenges for language models. A typical video consists of a sequence of shorter segments, or shots, that collectively form a coherent narrative. Each shot is analogous to a word in a sentence where multiple data streams of information (such as visual and auditory data) must be processed simultaneously. Comprehension of the entire video requires not only understanding the visual-audio information of each shot but also requires that the model links the ideas between each shot to generate a larger, all-encompassing story. Despite significant progress in the field, current works often overlook videos' more granular shot-by-shot semantic information. In this project, we propose a family of efficient large language vision models (LLVMs) to boost video summarization and captioning called Shotluck Holmes. By leveraging better pretraining and data collection strategies, we extend the abilities of existing small LLVMs from being able to understand a picture to being able to understand a sequence of frames. Specifically, we show that Shotluck Holmes achieves better performance than state-of-the-art results on the Shot2Story video captioning and summary task with significantly smaller and more computationally efficient models.
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.
Video summarization aims to generate a concise representation of a video, capturing its essential content and key moments while reducing its overall length. Although several methods employ attention mechanisms to handle long-term dependencies, they often fail to capture the visual significance inherent in frames. To address this limitation, we propose a CNN-based SpatioTemporal Attention (CSTA) method that stacks each feature of frames from a single video to form image-like frame representations and applies 2D CNN to these frame features. Our methodology relies on CNN to comprehend the inter and intra-frame relations and to find crucial attributes in videos by exploiting its ability to learn absolute positions within images. In contrast to previous work compromising efficiency by designing additional modules to focus on spatial importance, CSTA requires minimal computational overhead as it uses CNN as a sliding window. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (SumMe and TVSum) demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer MACs compared to previous methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/thswodnjs3/CSTA.
In this paper, we propose an integrated framework for multi-granular explanation of video summarization. This framework integrates methods for producing explanations both at the fragment level (indicating which video fragments influenced the most the decisions of the summarizer) and the more fine-grained visual object level (highlighting which visual objects were the most influential for the summarizer). To build this framework, we extend our previous work on this field, by investigating the use of a model-agnostic, perturbation-based approach for fragment-level explanation of the video summarization results, and introducing a new method that combines the results of video panoptic segmentation with an adaptation of a perturbation-based explanation approach to produce object-level explanations. The performance of the developed framework is evaluated using a state-of-the-art summarization method and two datasets for benchmarking video summarization. The findings of the conducted quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the ability of our framework to spot the most and least influential fragments and visual objects of the video for the summarizer, and to provide a comprehensive set of visual-based explanations about the output of the summarization process.
We propose a graph-based representation learning framework for video summarization. First, we convert an input video to a graph where nodes correspond to each of the video frames. Then, we impose sparsity on the graph by connecting only those pairs of nodes that are within a specified temporal distance. We then formulate the video summarization task as a binary node classification problem, precisely classifying video frames whether they should belong to the output summary video. A graph constructed this way aims to capture long-range interactions among video frames, and the sparsity ensures the model trains without hitting the memory and compute bottleneck. Experiments on two datasets(SumMe and TVSum) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed nimble model compared to existing state-of-the-art summarization approaches while being one order of magnitude more efficient in compute time and memory
Video summarization is a crucial research area that aims to efficiently browse and retrieve relevant information from the vast amount of video content available today. With the exponential growth of multimedia data, the ability to extract meaningful representations from videos has become essential. Video summarization techniques automatically generate concise summaries by selecting keyframes, shots, or segments that capture the video's essence. This process improves the efficiency and accuracy of various applications, including video surveillance, education, entertainment, and social media. Despite the importance of video summarization, there is a lack of diverse and representative datasets, hindering comprehensive evaluation and benchmarking of algorithms. Existing evaluation metrics also fail to fully capture the complexities of video summarization, limiting accurate algorithm assessment and hindering the field's progress. To overcome data scarcity challenges and improve evaluation, we propose an unsupervised approach that leverages video data structure and information for generating informative summaries. By moving away from fixed annotations, our framework can produce representative summaries effectively. Moreover, we introduce an innovative evaluation pipeline tailored specifically for video summarization. Human participants are involved in the evaluation, comparing our generated summaries to ground truth summaries and assessing their informativeness. This human-centric approach provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of our proposed techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that our training-free framework outperforms existing unsupervised approaches and achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art supervised methods.
In this paper, we present TAC-SUM, a novel and efficient training-free approach for video summarization that addresses the limitations of existing cluster-based models by incorporating temporal context. Our method partitions the input video into temporally consecutive segments with clustering information, enabling the injection of temporal awareness into the clustering process, setting it apart from prior cluster-based summarization methods. The resulting temporal-aware clusters are then utilized to compute the final summary, using simple rules for keyframe selection and frame importance scoring. Experimental results on the SumMe dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, outperforming existing unsupervised methods and achieving comparable performance to state-of-the-art supervised summarization techniques. Our source code is available for reference at \url{https://github.com/hcmus-thesis-gulu/TAC-SUM}.
Video temporal grounding (VTG) is a fine-grained video understanding problem that aims to ground relevant clips in untrimmed videos given natural language queries. Most existing VTG models are built upon frame-wise final-layer CLIP features, aided by additional temporal backbones (e.g., SlowFast) with sophisticated temporal reasoning mechanisms. In this work, we claim that CLIP itself already shows great potential for fine-grained spatial-temporal modeling, as each layer offers distinct yet useful information under different granularity levels. Motivated by this, we propose Reversed Recurrent Tuning (R^2-Tuning), a parameter- and memory-efficient transfer learning framework for video temporal grounding. Our method learns a lightweight R^2 Block containing only 1.5% of the total parameters to perform progressive spatial-temporal modeling. Starting from the last layer of CLIP, R^2 Block recurrently aggregates spatial features from earlier layers, then refines temporal correlation conditioning on the given query, resulting in a coarse-to-fine scheme. R^2-Tuning achieves state-of-the-art performance across three VTG tasks (i.e., moment retrieval, highlight detection, and video summarization) on six public benchmarks (i.e., QVHighlights, Charades-STA, Ego4D-NLQ, TACoS, YouTube Highlights, and TVSum) even without the additional backbone, demonstrating the significance and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
The Internet's wealth of content, with up to 60% published in English, starkly contrasts the global population, where only 18.8% are English speakers, and just 5.1% consider it their native language, leading to disparities in online information access. Unfortunately, automated processes for dubbing of video - replacing the audio track of a video with a translated alternative - remains a complex and challenging task due to pipelines, necessitating precise timing, facial movement synchronization, and prosody matching. While end-to-end dubbing offers a solution, data scarcity continues to impede the progress of both end-to-end and pipeline-based methods. In this work, we introduce Anim-400K, a comprehensive dataset of over 425K aligned animated video segments in Japanese and English supporting various video-related tasks, including automated dubbing, simultaneous translation, guided video summarization, and genre/theme/style classification. Our dataset is made publicly available for research purposes at https://github.com/davidmchan/Anim400K.
A short clip of video may contain progression of multiple events and an interesting story line. A human need to capture both the event in every shot and associate them together to understand the story behind it. In this work, we present a new multi-shot video understanding benchmark Shot2Story20K with detailed shot-level captions and comprehensive video summaries. To facilitate better semantic understanding of videos, we provide captions for both visual signals and human narrations. We design several distinct tasks including single-shot video and narration captioning, multi-shot video summarization, and video retrieval with shot descriptions. Preliminary experiments show some challenges to generate a long and comprehensive video summary. Nevertheless, the generated imperfect summaries can already significantly boost the performance of existing video understanding tasks such as video question-answering, promoting an under-explored setting of video understanding with detailed summaries.
In this work, we present an integrated system for spatiotemporal summarization of 360-degrees videos. The video summary production mainly involves the detection of salient events and their synopsis into a concise summary. The analysis relies on state-of-the-art methods for saliency detection in 360-degrees video (ATSal and SST-Sal) and video summarization (CA-SUM). It also contains a mechanism that classifies a 360-degrees video based on the use of static or moving camera during recording and decides which saliency detection method will be used, as well as a 2D video production component that is responsible to create a conventional 2D video containing the salient events in the 360-degrees video. Quantitative evaluations using two datasets for 360-degrees video saliency detection (VR-EyeTracking, Sports-360) show the accuracy and positive impact of the developed decision mechanism, and justify our choice to use two different methods for detecting the salient events. A qualitative analysis using content from these datasets, gives further insights about the functionality of the decision mechanism, shows the pros and cons of each used saliency detection method and demonstrates the advanced performance of the trained summarization method against a more conventional approach.