Ridouane Ghermi

Ridouane Ghermi, Xi Wang, Vicky Kalogeiton et al.

This report presents the results and findings of the first edition of the Short-Films 20K (SF20K) Competition, held in conjunction with the SLoMO Workshop at ICCV 2025. The competition is designed to advance story-level video understanding beyond short-clip action recognition, introducing an open-ended video question-answering task built on a corpus of amateur short films. This setup ensures that models must rely on multimodal understanding rather than memorization of popular movies. Evaluation is conducted using the SF20K-Test benchmark (95 movies, 979 question-answer pairs) and scored via LLM-QA-Eval, an automated judge based on GPT-4.1-nano. The competition attracted 22 teams and 286 submissions across two tracks: a Main Track with unrestricted model size and a Special Track limited to models under 8 billion parameters. The winning team achieved 65.7% accuracy on the Main Track and 48.7% on the Special Track, against a human performance ceiling of 91.7%. Our analysis reveals several key findings: narrative-aware, shot-level processing consistently outperforms uniform frame sampling; well-designed multi-stage pipelines using smaller models can match or exceed end-to-end inference with models over 30x larger; and subtitle quality is a dominant factor in performance. These results highlight that the primary bottleneck in long-form video QA lies in information selection and reasoning structure rather than raw model capacity, and that a substantial gap remains between current methods and human-level narrative comprehension.

Ridouane Ghermi, Xi Wang, Vicky Kalogeiton et al.

Recent developments in vision-language models have significantly advanced video understanding. Existing datasets and tasks, however, have notable limitations. Most datasets are confined to short videos with limited events and narrow narratives. For example, datasets with instructional and egocentric videos often depict activities of one person in a single scene. Although existing movie datasets offer richer content, they are often limited to short-term tasks, lack publicly available videos, and frequently encounter data leakage issues given the use of subtitles and other information about commercial movies during LLM pretraining. To address the above limitations, we propose Short-Films 20K (SF20K), the largest publicly available movie dataset. SF20K is composed of 20,143 amateur films and offers long-term video tasks in the form of multiple-choice and open-ended question answering. Our extensive analysis of SF20K reveals minimal data leakage, emphasizes the need for long-term reasoning, and demonstrates the strong performance of recent VLMs. Finally, we show that instruction tuning on the SF20K-Train set substantially improves model performance, paving the way for future progress in long-term video understanding.

Hannes Fassold, Ridouane Ghermi

The automatic detection and tracking of general objects (like persons, animals or cars), text and logos in a video is crucial for many video understanding tasks, and usually real-time processing as required. We propose OmniTrack, an efficient and robust algorithm which is able to automatically detect and track objects, text as well as brand logos in real-time. It combines a powerful deep learning based object detector (YoloV3) with high-quality optical flow methods. Based on the reference YoloV3 C++ implementation, we did some important performance optimizations which will be described. The major steps in the training procedure for the combined detector for text and logo will be presented. We will describe then the OmniTrack algorithm, consisting of the phases preprocessing, feature calculation, prediction, matching and update. Several performance optimizations have been implemented there as well, like doing the object detection and optical flow calculation asynchronously. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm runs in real-time for standard definition ($720x576$) video on a PC with a Quadro RTX 5000 GPU.