Large pre-trained vision models achieve impressive success in computer vision. However, fully fine-tuning large models for downstream tasks, particularly in video understanding, can be prohibitively computationally expensive. Recent studies turn their focus towards efficient image-to-video transfer learning. Nevertheless, existing efficient fine-tuning methods lack attention to training memory usage and exploration of transferring a larger model to the video domain. In this paper, we present a novel Spatial-Temporal Side Network for memory-efficient fine-tuning large image models to video understanding, named Side4Video. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight spatial-temporal side network attached to the frozen vision model, which avoids the backpropagation through the heavy pre-trained model and utilizes multi-level spatial features from the original image model. Extremely memory-efficient architecture enables our method to reduce 75% memory usage than previous adapter-based methods. In this way, we can transfer a huge ViT-E (4.4B) for video understanding tasks which is 14x larger than ViT-L (304M). Our approach achieves remarkable performance on various video datasets across unimodal and cross-modal tasks (i.e., action recognition and text-video retrieval), especially in Something-Something V1&V2 (67.3% & 74.6%), Kinetics-400 (88.6%), MSR-VTT (52.3%), MSVD (56.1%) and VATEX (68.8%). We release our code at https://github.com/HJYao00/Side4Video.
This paper does not present a novel method. Instead, it delves into an essential, yet must-know baseline in light of the latest advancements in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI): the utilization of GPT-4 for visual understanding. Our study centers on the evaluation of GPT-4's linguistic and visual capabilities in zero-shot visual recognition tasks. Specifically, we explore the potential of its generated rich textual descriptions across various categories to enhance recognition performance without any training. Additionally, we evaluate its visual proficiency in directly recognizing diverse visual content. To achieve this, we conduct an extensive series of experiments, systematically quantifying the performance of GPT-4 across three modalities: images, videos, and point clouds. This comprehensive evaluation encompasses a total of 16 widely recognized benchmark datasets, providing top-1 and top-5 accuracy metrics. Our study reveals that leveraging GPT-4's advanced linguistic knowledge to generate rich descriptions markedly improves zero-shot recognition. In terms of visual proficiency, GPT-4V's average performance across 16 datasets sits roughly between the capabilities of OpenAI-CLIP's ViT-L and EVA-CLIP's ViT-E. We hope that this research will contribute valuable data points and experience for future studies. We release our code at https://github.com/whwu95/GPT4Vis.