Vid2Seq: a pretrained visual language model for describing multi-event videos
Videos have become an increasingly important part of our daily lives, spanning fields such as entertainment, education, and communication. Understanding the content of videos, however, is a challenging task as videos often contain multiple events occurring at different time scales. For example, a video of a musher hitching up dogs to a dog sled before they all race away involves a long event (the dogs pulling the sled) and a short event (the dogs being hitched to the sled). One way to spur research in video understanding is via the task of dense video captioning, which consists of temporally localizing and describing all events in a minutes-long video. This differs from single image captioning and standard video captioning, which consists of describing short videos with a single sentence.
Dense video captioning systems have wide applications, such as making videos accessible to people with visual or auditory impairments, automatically generating chapters for videos, or improving the search of video moments in large databases. Current dense video captioning approaches, however, have several limitations — for example, they often contain highly specialized task-specific components, which make it challenging to integrate them into powerful foundation models. Furthermore, they are often trained exclusively on manually annotated datasets, which are very difficult to obtain and hence are not a scalable solution.
