Yali Wang

Xiangyu Zeng, Kunchang Li, Chenting Wang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in short video understanding. However, understanding long-form videos still remains challenging for MLLMs. This paper proposes TimeSuite, a collection of new designs to adapt the existing short-form video MLLMs for long video understanding, including a simple yet efficient framework to process long video sequence, a high-quality video dataset for grounded tuning of MLLMs, and a carefully-designed instruction tuning task to explicitly incorporate the grounding supervision in the traditional QA format. Specifically, based on VideoChat, we propose our long-video MLLM, coined as VideoChat-T, by implementing a token shuffling to compress long video tokens and introducing Temporal Adaptive Position Encoding (TAPE) to enhance the temporal awareness of visual representation. Meanwhile, we introduce the TimePro, a comprehensive grounding-centric instruction tuning dataset composed of 9 tasks and 349k high-quality grounded annotations. Notably, we design a new instruction tuning task type, called Temporal Grounded Caption, to peform detailed video descriptions with the corresponding time stamps prediction. This explicit temporal location prediction will guide MLLM to correctly attend on the visual content when generating description, and thus reduce the hallucination risk caused by the LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that our TimeSuite provides a successful solution to enhance the long video understanding capability of short-form MLLM, achieving improvement of 5.6% and 6.8% on the benchmarks of Egoschema and VideoMME, respectively. In addition, VideoChat-T exhibits robust zero-shot temporal grounding capabilities, significantly outperforming the existing state-of-the-art MLLMs. After fine-tuning, it performs on par with the traditional supervised expert models.

Boyu Chen, Siran Chen, Kunchang Li et al.

Video understanding has been considered as one critical step towards world modeling, which is an important long-term problem in AI research. Recently, multi-modal foundation models have shown such potential via large-scale pretraining. However, these models simply align encoders of different modalities via contrastive learning, while lacking deeper multi-modal interactions, which is critical for understanding complex target movements with diversified video scenes. To fill this gap, we propose a unified Super Encoding Network (SEN) for video understanding, which builds up such distinct interactions through recursive association of multi-modal encoders in the foundation models. Specifically, we creatively treat those well-trained encoders as "super neurons" in our SEN. Via designing a Recursive Association (RA) block, we progressively fuse multi-modalities with the input video, based on knowledge integrating, distributing, and prompting of super neurons in a recursive manner. In this way, our SEN can effectively encode deeper multi-modal interactions, for prompting various video understanding tasks in downstream. Extensive experiments show that, our SEN can remarkably boost the four most representative video tasks, including tracking, recognition, chatting, and editing, e.g., for pixel-level tracking, the average jaccard index improves 2.7%, temporal coherence(TC) drops 8.8% compared to the popular CaDeX++ approach. For one-shot video editing, textual alignment improves 6.4%, and frame consistency increases 4.1% compared to the popular TuneA-Video approach.