Hanzhong Liang

Kejuan Yang, Yizhuo Zhang, Mingyuan Du et al.

Global-scale video moderation faces a dual challenge: the need for fine-grained multi-modal reasoning and the demand for interpretable outputs to support downstream enforcement. Traditional moderation systems often rely on fragmented black-box classifiers that are difficult to maintain and lack transparency. In this paper, we present UNIVID, a UNIfied VIsion-language model for video moDeration. Unlike standard classification models, UNIVID generates policy-aware captions that serve as an interpretable intermediate representation, enabling human-verifiable decisions and multi-task reusability. While existing open-source and commercial VLMs often suffer from safety-guardrail refusals and lack fine-grained policy alignment, we develop a specialized training data recipe that combines expert human-refined labels with synthetic data to align the model with our safety guidelines. By integrating UNIVID as the core captioner, we design a novel end-to-end video moderation system that reduces violation leakage by 42.7% and overkill rate by 37.0% relatively. Meanwhile, by replacing over 1,000 policy-specific models with a single UNIVID backbone, we recycled extensive computation resources while reducing engineering maintenance overhead. To our knowledge, this is one of the first reports of a high-efficiency captioning VLM successfully supporting industrial-scale moderation and cross-functional business.

Zixuan Wang, Jinghao Shi, Hanzhong Liang et al.

Effective content moderation is essential for video platforms to safeguard user experience and uphold community standards. While traditional video classification models effectively handle well-defined moderation tasks, they struggle with complicated scenarios such as implicit harmful content and contextual ambiguity. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a promising solution to these limitations with their superior cross-modal reasoning and contextual understanding. However, two key challenges hinder their industrial adoption. First, the high computational cost of MLLMs makes full-scale deployment impractical. Second, adapting generative models for discriminative classification remains an open research problem. In this paper, we first introduce an efficient method to transform a generative MLLM into a multimodal classifier using minimal discriminative training data. To enable industry-scale deployment, we then propose a router-ranking cascade system that integrates MLLMs with a lightweight router model. Offline experiments demonstrate that our MLLM-based approach improves F1 score by 66.50% over traditional classifiers while requiring only 2% of the fine-tuning data. Online evaluations show that our system increases automatic content moderation volume by 41%, while the cascading deployment reduces computational cost to only 1.5% of direct full-scale deployment.

Hanzhong Liang, Jinghao Shi, Xiang Shen et al.

Video understanding plays a fundamental role for content moderation on short video platforms, enabling the detection of inappropriate content. While classification remains the dominant approach for content moderation, it often struggles in scenarios requiring rapid and cost-efficient responses, such as trend adaptation and urgent escalations. To address this issue, we introduce an Embedding-Based Retrieval (EBR) method designed to complement traditional classification approaches. We first leverage a Supervised Contrastive Learning (SCL) framework to train a suite of foundation embedding models, including both single-modal and multi-modal architectures. Our models demonstrate superior performance over established contrastive learning methods such as CLIP and MoCo. Building on these embedding models, we design and implement the embedding-based retrieval system that integrates embedding generation and video retrieval to enable efficient and effective trend handling. Comprehensive offline experiments on 25 diverse emerging trends show that EBR improves ROC-AUC from 0.85 to 0.99 and PR-AUC from 0.35 to 0.95. Further online experiments reveal that EBR increases action rates by 10.32% and reduces operational costs by over 80%, while also enhancing interpretability and flexibility compared to classification-based solutions.