Hongyi Pan

Zheyuan Zhang, Monica Dou, Linkai Peng et al.

Advertisement videos serve as a rich and valuable source of purpose-driven information, encompassing high-quality visual, textual, and contextual cues designed to engage viewers. They are often more complex than general videos of similar duration due to their structured narratives and rapid scene transitions, posing significant challenges to multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). In this work, we introduce VideoAds, the first dataset tailored for benchmarking the performance of MLLMs on advertisement videos. VideoAds comprises well-curated advertisement videos with complex temporal structures, accompanied by \textbf{manually} annotated diverse questions across three core tasks: visual finding, video summary, and visual reasoning. We propose a quantitative measure to compare VideoAds against existing benchmarks in terms of video complexity. Through extensive experiments, we find that Qwen2.5-VL-72B, an opensource MLLM, achieves 73.35\% accuracy on VideoAds, outperforming GPT-4o (66.82\%) and Gemini-1.5 Pro (69.66\%); the two proprietary models especially fall behind the opensource model in video summarization and reasoning, but perform the best in visual finding. Notably, human experts easily achieve a remarkable accuracy of 94.27\%. These results underscore the necessity of advancing MLLMs' temporal modeling capabilities and highlight VideoAds as a potentially pivotal benchmark for future research in understanding video that requires high FPS sampling. The dataset and evaluation code will be publicly available at https://videoadsbenchmark.netlify.app.

Hongyi Pan, Diaa Badawi, Runxuan Miao et al.

Power iteration is a fundamental algorithm in data analysis. It extracts the eigenvector corresponding to the largest eigenvalue of a given matrix. Applications include ranking algorithms, recommendation systems, principal component analysis (PCA), among many others. In this paper, we introduce multiplication-avoiding power iteration (MAPI), which replaces the standard $\ell_2$-inner products that appear at the regular power iteration (RPI) with multiplication-free vector products which are Mercer-type kernel operations related with the $\ell_1$ norm. Precisely, for an $n\times n$ matrix, MAPI requires $n$ multiplications, while RPI needs $n^2$ multiplications per iteration. Therefore, MAPI provides a significant reduction of the number of multiplication operations, which are known to be costly in terms of energy consumption. We provide applications of MAPI to PCA-based image reconstruction as well as to graph-based ranking algorithms. When compared to RPI, MAPI not only typically converges much faster, but also provides superior performance.

Hongyi Pan, Diaa Badawi, Erdem Koyuncu et al.

We consider a family of vector dot products that can be implemented using sign changes and addition operations only. The dot products are energy-efficient as they avoid the multiplication operation entirely. Moreover, the dot products induce the $\ell_1$-norm, thus providing robustness to impulsive noise. First, we analytically prove that the dot products yield symmetric, positive semi-definite generalized covariance matrices, thus enabling principal component analysis (PCA). Moreover, the generalized covariance matrices can be constructed in an Energy Efficient (EEF) manner due to the multiplication-free property of the underlying vector products. We present image reconstruction examples in which our EEF PCA method result in the highest peak signal-to-noise ratios compared to the ordinary $\ell_2$-PCA and the recursive $\ell_1$-PCA.