Guang Chen

Xin Gu, Haoji Zhang, Qihang Fan et al.

Spatio-temporal video grounding (STVG) requires localizing a target object in untrimmed videos both temporally and spatially from natural language descriptions. Despite their strong language understanding, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) underperform on STVG due to misaligned training objectives and weak fine-grained region-word alignment in standard visual encoders. To address this, we propose STVG-o1, the first framework that enables off-the-shelf MLLMs to achieve state-of-the-art STVG performance without any architectural modifications. Our method introduces a bounding-box chain-of-thought mechanism that explicitly reasons about spatio-temporal locations in an intermediate step before producing the final prediction. We further design a multi-dimensional reinforcement reward function consisting of format, consistency, temporal, spatial, and think rewards, which provides geometry-aware supervision through reinforcement fine-tuning. Evaluated on HCSTVG-v1/v2 and VidSTG, STVG-o1 sets new state-of-the-art results on HCSTVG, outperforming the best task-specific method by 7.3\% m\_tIoU on HCSTVG-v1, matching specialized models on VidSTG, and surpassing all existing MLLM-based approaches by large margins. It also demonstrates strong open-vocabulary generalization across datasets, establishing MLLMs as viable and powerful backbones for precise spatio-temporal grounding. Our code and models will be released.

Guofeng Zhang, Angtian Wang, Jacob Zhiyuan Fang et al. · bytedance

Text-to-video generation has advanced rapidly in visual fidelity, whereas standard methods still have limited ability to control the subject composition of generated scenes. Prior work shows that adding localized text control signals, such as bounding boxes or segmentation masks, can help. However, these methods struggle in complex scenarios and degrade in multi-object settings, offering limited precision and lacking a clear correspondence between individual trajectories and visual entities as the number of controllable objects increases. We introduce Text-Grounded Trajectories (TGT), a framework that conditions video generation on trajectories paired with localized text descriptions. We propose Location-Aware Cross-Attention (LACA) to integrate these signals and adopt a dual-CFG scheme to separately modulate local and global text guidance. In addition, we develop a data processing pipeline that produces trajectories with localized descriptions of tracked entities, and we annotate two million high quality video clips to train TGT. Together, these components enable TGT to use point trajectories as intuitive motion handles, pairing each trajectory with text to control both appearance and motion. Extensive experiments show that TGT achieves higher visual quality, more accurate text alignment, and improved motion controllability compared with prior approaches. Website: https://textgroundedtraj.github.io.