Text-to-Video

Sequential video understanding, as an emerging video understanding task, has driven lots of researchers' attention because of its goal-oriented nature. This paper studies weakly supervised sequential video understanding where the accurate time-stamp level text-video alignment is not provided. We solve this task by borrowing ideas from CLIP. Specifically, we use a transformer to aggregate frame-level features for video representation and use a pre-trained text encoder to encode the texts corresponding to each action and the whole video, respectively. To model the correspondence between text and video, we propose a multiple granularity loss, where the video-paragraph contrastive loss enforces matching between the whole video and the complete script, and a fine-grained frame-sentence contrastive loss enforces the matching between each action and its description. As the frame-sentence correspondence is not available, we propose to use the fact that video actions happen sequentially in the temporal domain to generate pseudo frame-sentence correspondence and supervise the network training with the pseudo labels. Extensive experiments on video sequence verification and text-to-video matching show that our method outperforms baselines by a large margin, which validates the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Code is available at https://github.com/svip-lab/WeakSVR.

Many recent studies leverage the pre-trained CLIP for text-video cross-modal retrieval by tuning the backbone with additional heavy modules, which not only brings huge computational burdens with much more parameters, but also leads to the knowledge forgetting from upstream models. In this work, we propose the VoP: Text-Video Co-operative Prompt Tuning for efficient tuning on the text-video retrieval task. The proposed VoP is an end-to-end framework with both video & text prompts introducing, which can be regarded as a powerful baseline with only 0.1% trainable parameters. Further, based on the spatio-temporal characteristics of videos, we develop three novel video prompt mechanisms to improve the performance with different scales of trainable parameters. The basic idea of the VoP enhancement is to model the frame position, frame context, and layer function with specific trainable prompts, respectively. Extensive experiments show that compared to full fine-tuning, the enhanced VoP achieves a 1.4% average R@1 gain across five text-video retrieval benchmarks with 6x less parameter overhead. The code will be available at https://github.com/bighuang624/VoP.

Adopting contrastive image-text pretrained models like CLIP towards video classification has gained attention due to its cost-effectiveness and competitive performance. However, recent works in this area face a trade-off. Finetuning the pretrained model to achieve strong supervised performance results in low zero-shot generalization. Similarly, freezing the backbone to retain zero-shot capability causes significant drop in supervised accuracy. Because of this, recent works in literature typically train separate models for supervised and zero-shot action recognition. In this work, we propose a multimodal prompt learning scheme that works to balance the supervised and zero-shot performance under a single unified training. Our prompting approach on the vision side caters for three aspects: 1) Global video-level prompts to model the data distribution; 2) Local frame-level prompts to provide per-frame discriminative conditioning; and 3) a summary prompt to extract a condensed video representation. Additionally, we define a prompting scheme on the text side to augment the textual context. Through this prompting scheme, we can achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on Kinetics-600, HMDB51 and UCF101 while remaining competitive in the supervised setting. By keeping the pretrained backbone frozen, we optimize a much lower number of parameters and retain the existing general representation which helps achieve the strong zero-shot performance. Our codes and models will be publicly released.

Existing Siamese tracking methods, which are built on pair-wise matching between two single frames, heavily rely on additional sophisticated mechanism to exploit temporal information among successive video frames, hindering them from high efficiency and industrial deployments. In this work, we resort to sequence-level target matching that can encode temporal contexts into the spatial features through a neat feedforward video model. Specifically, we adapt the standard video transformer architecture to visual tracking by enabling spatiotemporal feature learning directly from frame-level patch sequences. To better adapt to the tracking task, we carefully blend the spatiotemporal information in the video clips through sequential multi-branch triplet blocks, which formulates a video transformer backbone. Our experimental study compares different model variants, such as tokenization strategies, hierarchical structures, and video attention schemes. Then, we propose a disentangled dual-template mechanism that decouples static and dynamic appearance changes over time, and reduces the temporal redundancy in video frames. Extensive experiments show that our method, named as VideoTrack, achieves state-of-the-art results while running in real-time.

Contrastive learning-based video-language representation learning approaches, e.g., CLIP, have achieved outstanding performance, which pursue semantic interaction upon pre-defined video-text pairs. To clarify this coarse-grained global interaction and move a step further, we have to encounter challenging shell-breaking interactions for fine-grained cross-modal learning. In this paper, we creatively model video-text as game players with multivariate cooperative game theory to wisely handle the uncertainty during fine-grained semantic interaction with diverse granularity, flexible combination, and vague intensity. Concretely, we propose Hierarchical Banzhaf Interaction (HBI) to value possible correspondence between video frames and text words for sensitive and explainable cross-modal contrast. To efficiently realize the cooperative game of multiple video frames and multiple text words, the proposed method clusters the original video frames (text words) and computes the Banzhaf Interaction between the merged tokens. By stacking token merge modules, we achieve cooperative games at different semantic levels. Extensive experiments on commonly used text-video retrieval and video-question answering benchmarks with superior performances justify the efficacy of our HBI. More encouragingly, it can also serve as a visualization tool to promote the understanding of cross-modal interaction, which may have a far-reaching impact on the community. Project page is available at https://jpthu17.github.io/HBI/.

Despite the remarkable progress in deep generative models, synthesizing high-resolution and temporally coherent videos still remains a challenge due to their high-dimensionality and complex temporal dynamics along with large spatial variations. Recent works on diffusion models have shown their potential to solve this challenge, yet they suffer from severe computation- and memory-inefficiency that limit the scalability. To handle this issue, we propose a novel generative model for videos, coined projected latent video diffusion models (PVDM), a probabilistic diffusion model which learns a video distribution in a low-dimensional latent space and thus can be efficiently trained with high-resolution videos under limited resources. Specifically, PVDM is composed of two components: (a) an autoencoder that projects a given video as 2D-shaped latent vectors that factorize the complex cubic structure of video pixels and (b) a diffusion model architecture specialized for our new factorized latent space and the training/sampling procedure to synthesize videos of arbitrary length with a single model. Experiments on popular video generation datasets demonstrate the superiority of PVDM compared with previous video synthesis methods; e.g., PVDM obtains the FVD score of 639.7 on the UCF-101 long video (128 frames) generation benchmark, which improves 1773.4 of the prior state-of-the-art.

Encoding videos as neural networks is a recently proposed approach that allows new forms of video processing. However, traditional techniques still outperform such neural video representation (NVR) methods for the task of video compression. This performance gap can be explained by the fact that current NVR methods: i) use architectures that do not efficiently obtain a compact representation of temporal and spatial information; and ii) minimize rate and distortion disjointly (first overfitting a network on a video and then using heuristic techniques such as post-training quantization or weight pruning to compress the model). We propose a novel convolutional architecture for video representation that better represents spatio-temporal information and a training strategy capable of jointly optimizing rate and distortion. All network and quantization parameters are jointly learned end-to-end, and the post-training operations used in previous works are unnecessary. We evaluate our method on the UVG dataset, achieving new state-of-the-art results for video compression with NVRs. Moreover, we deliver the first NVR-based video compression method that improves over the typically adopted HEVC benchmark (x265, disabled b-frames, "medium" preset), closing the gap to autoencoder-based video compression techniques.

We propose a text-to-image generation algorithm based on deep neural networks when text captions for images are unavailable during training. In this work, instead of simply generating pseudo-ground-truth sentences of training images using existing image captioning methods, we employ a pretrained CLIP model, which is capable of properly aligning embeddings of images and corresponding texts in a joint space and, consequently, works well on zero-shot recognition tasks. We optimize a text-to-image generation model by maximizing the data log-likelihood conditioned on pairs of image-text CLIP embeddings. To better align data in the two domains, we employ a principled way based on a variational inference, which efficiently estimates an approximate posterior of the hidden text embedding given an image and its CLIP feature. Experimental results validate that the proposed framework outperforms existing approaches by large margins under unsupervised and semi-supervised text-to-image generation settings.

This paper presents an investigation into long-tail video recognition. We demonstrate that, unlike naturally-collected video datasets and existing long-tail image benchmarks, current video benchmarks fall short on multiple long-tailed properties. Most critically, they lack few-shot classes in their tails. In response, we propose new video benchmarks that better assess long-tail recognition, by sampling subsets from two datasets: SSv2 and VideoLT. We then propose a method, Long-Tail Mixed Reconstruction (LMR), which reduces overfitting to instances from few-shot classes by reconstructing them as weighted combinations of samples from head classes. LMR then employs label mixing to learn robust decision boundaries. It achieves state-of-the-art average class accuracy on EPIC-KITCHENS and the proposed SSv2-LT and VideoLT-LT. Benchmarks and code at: github.com/tobyperrett/lmr

The recent large-scale Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model has shown great potential in various downstream tasks via leveraging the pretrained vision and language knowledge. Scene text, which contains rich textual and visual information, has an inherent connection with a model like CLIP. Recently, pretraining approaches based on vision language models have made effective progresses in the field of text detection. In contrast to these works, this paper proposes a new method, termed TCM, focusing on Turning the CLIP Model directly for text detection without pretraining process. We demonstrate the advantages of the proposed TCM as follows: (1) The underlying principle of our framework can be applied to improve existing scene text detector. (2) It facilitates the few-shot training capability of existing methods, e.g., by using 10% of labeled data, we significantly improve the performance of the baseline method with an average of 22% in terms of the F-measure on 4 benchmarks. (3) By turning the CLIP model into existing scene text detection methods, we further achieve promising domain adaptation ability. The code will be publicly released at https://github.com/wenwenyu/TCM.

Sequence generation models have recently made significant progress in unifying various vision tasks. Although some auto-regressive models have demonstrated promising results in end-to-end text spotting, they use specific detection formats while ignoring various text shapes and are limited in the maximum number of text instances that can be detected. To overcome these limitations, we propose a UNIfied scene Text Spotter, called UNITS. Our model unifies various detection formats, including quadrilaterals and polygons, allowing it to detect text in arbitrary shapes. Additionally, we apply starting-point prompting to enable the model to extract texts from an arbitrary starting point, thereby extracting more texts beyond the number of instances it was trained on. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Further analysis shows that UNITS can extract a larger number of texts than it was trained on. We provide the code for our method at https://github.com/clovaai/units.

The correlation between the vision and text is essential for video moment retrieval (VMR), however, existing methods heavily rely on separate pre-training feature extractors for visual and textual understanding. Without sufficient temporal boundary annotations, it is non-trivial to learn universal video-text alignments. In this work, we explore multi-modal correlations derived from large-scale image-text data to facilitate generalisable VMR. To address the limitations of image-text pre-training models on capturing the video changes, we propose a generic method, referred to as Visual-Dynamic Injection (VDI), to empower the model's understanding of video moments. Whilst existing VMR methods are focusing on building temporal-aware video features, being aware of the text descriptions about the temporal changes is also critical but originally overlooked in pre-training by matching static images with sentences. Therefore, we extract visual context and spatial dynamic information from video frames and explicitly enforce their alignments with the phrases describing video changes (e.g. verb). By doing so, the potentially relevant visual and motion patterns in videos are encoded in the corresponding text embeddings (injected) so to enable more accurate video-text alignments. We conduct extensive experiments on two VMR benchmark datasets (Charades-STA and ActivityNet-Captions) and achieve state-of-the-art performances. Especially, VDI yields notable advantages when being tested on the out-of-distribution splits where the testing samples involve novel scenes and vocabulary.

Multi-channel video-language retrieval require models to understand information from different channels (e.g. video+question, video+speech) to correctly link a video with a textual response or query. Fortunately, contrastive multimodal models are shown to be highly effective at aligning entities in images/videos and text, e.g., CLIP; text contrastive models are extensively studied recently for their strong ability of producing discriminative sentence embeddings, e.g., SimCSE. However, there is not a clear way to quickly adapt these two lines to multi-channel video-language retrieval with limited data and resources. In this paper, we identify a principled model design space with two axes: how to represent videos and how to fuse video and text information. Based on categorization of recent methods, we investigate the options of representing videos using continuous feature vectors or discrete text tokens; for the fusion method, we explore the use of a multimodal transformer or a pretrained contrastive text model. We extensively evaluate the four combinations on five video-language datasets. We surprisingly find that discrete text tokens coupled with a pretrained contrastive text model yields the best performance, which can even outperform state-of-the-art on the iVQA and How2QA datasets without additional training on millions of video-text data. Further analysis shows that this is because representing videos as text tokens captures the key visual information and text tokens are naturally aligned with text models that are strong retrievers after the contrastive pretraining process. All the empirical analysis establishes a solid foundation for future research on affordable and upgradable multimodal intelligence. The code will be released at https://github.com/XudongLinthu/upgradable-multimodal-intelligence to facilitate future research.

We propose Text2Scene, a method to automatically create realistic textures for virtual scenes composed of multiple objects. Guided by a reference image and text descriptions, our pipeline adds detailed texture on labeled 3D geometries in the room such that the generated colors respect the hierarchical structure or semantic parts that are often composed of similar materials. Instead of applying flat stylization on the entire scene at a single step, we obtain weak semantic cues from geometric segmentation, which are further clarified by assigning initial colors to segmented parts. Then we add texture details for individual objects such that their projections on image space exhibit feature embedding aligned with the embedding of the input. The decomposition makes the entire pipeline tractable to a moderate amount of computation resources and memory. As our framework utilizes the existing resources of image and text embedding, it does not require dedicated datasets with high-quality textures designed by skillful artists. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first practical and scalable approach that can create detailed and realistic textures of the desired style that maintain structural context for scenes with multiple objects.

In this paper, we study the problem of temporal video grounding (TVG), which aims to predict the starting/ending time points of moments described by a text sentence within a long untrimmed video. Benefiting from fine-grained 3D visual features, the TVG techniques have achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, the high complexity of 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) makes extracting dense 3D visual features time-consuming, which calls for intensive memory and computing resources. Towards efficient TVG, we propose a novel text-visual prompting (TVP) framework, which incorporates optimized perturbation patterns (that we call 'prompts') into both visual inputs and textual features of a TVG model. In sharp contrast to 3D CNNs, we show that TVP allows us to effectively co-train vision encoder and language encoder in a 2D TVG model and improves the performance of crossmodal feature fusion using only low-complexity sparse 2D visual features. Further, we propose a Temporal-Distance IoU (TDIoU) loss for efficient learning of TVG. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions datasets, empirically show that the proposed TVP significantly boosts the performance of 2D TVG (e.g., 9.79% improvement on Charades-STA and 30.77% improvement on ActivityNet Captions) and achieves 5x inference acceleration over TVG using 3D visual features. Codes are available at Open.Intel.

Video captioning aims to describe the content of videos using natural language. Although significant progress has been made, there is still much room to improve the performance for real-world applications, mainly due to the long-tail and open set issues of words. In this paper, we propose a text with knowledge graph augmented transformer (TextKG) for video captioning. Notably, TextKG is a two-stream transformer, formed by the external stream and internal stream. The external stream is designed to absorb external knowledge, which models the interactions between the external knowledge, e.g., pre-built knowledge graph, and the built-in information of videos, e.g., the salient object regions, speech transcripts, and video captions, to mitigate the open set of words challenge. Meanwhile, the internal stream is designed to exploit the multi-modality information in original videos (e.g., the appearance of video frames, speech transcripts, and video captions) to deal with the long-tail issue. In addition, the cross attention mechanism is also used in both streams to share information. In this way, the two streams can help each other for more accurate results. Extensive experiments conducted on four challenging video captioning datasets, i.e., YouCookII, ActivityNet Captions, MSR-VTT, and MSVD, demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, the proposed TextKG method outperforms the best published results by improving 18.7% absolute CIDEr scores on the YouCookII dataset.

Modelling and understanding time remains a challenge in contemporary video understanding models. With language emerging as a key driver towards powerful generalization, it is imperative for foundational video-language models to have a sense of time. In this paper, we consider a specific aspect of temporal understanding: consistency of time order as elicited by before/after relations. We establish that seven existing video-language models struggle to understand even such simple temporal relations. We then question whether it is feasible to equip these foundational models with temporal awareness without re-training them from scratch. Towards this, we propose a temporal adaptation recipe on top of one such model, VideoCLIP, based on post-pretraining on a small amount of video-text data. We conduct a zero-shot evaluation of the adapted models on six datasets for three downstream tasks which require varying degrees of time awareness. We observe encouraging performance gains especially when the task needs higher time awareness. Our work serves as a first step towards probing and instilling a sense of time in existing video-language models without the need for data and compute-intense training from scratch.

Generating a video given the first several static frames is challenging as it anticipates reasonable future frames with temporal coherence. Besides video prediction, the ability to rewind from the last frame or infilling between the head and tail is also crucial, but they have rarely been explored for video completion. Since there could be different outcomes from the hints of just a few frames, a system that can follow natural language to perform video completion may significantly improve controllability. Inspired by this, we introduce a novel task, text-guided video completion (TVC), which requests the model to generate a video from partial frames guided by an instruction. We then propose Multimodal Masked Video Generation (MMVG) to address this TVC task. During training, MMVG discretizes the video frames into visual tokens and masks most of them to perform video completion from any time point. At inference time, a single MMVG model can address all 3 cases of TVC, including video prediction, rewind, and infilling, by applying corresponding masking conditions. We evaluate MMVG in various video scenarios, including egocentric, animation, and gaming. Extensive experimental results indicate that MMVG is effective in generating high-quality visual appearances with text guidance for TVC.

In this paper, we investigate an open research task of generating controllable 3D textured shapes from the given textual descriptions. Previous works either require ground truth caption labeling or extensive optimization time. To resolve these issues, we present a novel framework, TAPS3D, to train a text-guided 3D shape generator with pseudo captions. Specifically, based on rendered 2D images, we retrieve relevant words from the CLIP vocabulary and construct pseudo captions using templates. Our constructed captions provide high-level semantic supervision for generated 3D shapes. Further, in order to produce fine-grained textures and increase geometry diversity, we propose to adopt low-level image regularization to enable fake-rendered images to align with the real ones. During the inference phase, our proposed model can generate 3D textured shapes from the given text without any additional optimization. We conduct extensive experiments to analyze each of our proposed components and show the efficacy of our framework in generating high-fidelity 3D textured and text-relevant shapes.