Self-Paced and Self-Corrective Masked Prediction for Movie Trailer Generation
This addresses a challenging video editing task for movie production, offering an incremental improvement over current methods.
The paper tackles the problem of automatic movie trailer generation by proposing a new self-paced and self-corrective masked prediction method (SSMP) that avoids error propagation in existing approaches, achieving state-of-the-art results as shown in quantitative evaluations and user studies.
As a challenging video editing task, movie trailer generation involves selecting and reorganizing movie shots to create engaging trailers. Currently, most existing automatic trailer generation methods employ a "selection-then-ranking" paradigm (i.e., first selecting key shots and then ranking them), which suffers from inevitable error propagation and limits the quality of the generated trailers. Beyond this paradigm, we propose a new self-paced and self-corrective masked prediction method called SSMP, which achieves state-of-the-art results in automatic trailer generation via bi-directional contextual modeling and progressive self-correction. In particular, SSMP trains a Transformer encoder that takes the movie shot sequences as prompts and generates corresponding trailer shot sequences accordingly. The model is trained via masked prediction, reconstructing each trailer shot sequence from its randomly masked counterpart. The mask ratio is self-paced, allowing the task difficulty to adapt to the model and thereby improving model performance. When generating a movie trailer, the model fills the shot positions with high confidence at each step and re-masks the remaining positions for the next prediction, forming a progressive self-correction mechanism that is analogous to how human editors work. Both quantitative results and user studies demonstrate the superiority of SSMP in comparison to existing automatic movie trailer generation methods. Demo is available at: https://github.com/Dixin-Lab/SSMP.