ST-LLM: Large Language Models Are Effective Temporal Learners

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive capabilities in text comprehension and generation, prompting research efforts towards video LLMs to facilitate human-AI interaction at the video level. However, how to effectively encode and understand videos in video-based dialogue systems remains to be solved. In this paper, we investigate a straightforward yet unexplored question: Can we feed all spatial-temporal tokens into the LLM, thus delegating the task of video sequence modeling to the LLMs? Surprisingly, this simple approach yields significant improvements in video understanding. Based upon this, we propose ST-LLM, an effective video-LLM baseline with Spatial-Temporal sequence modeling inside LLM. Furthermore, to address the overhead and stability issues introduced by uncompressed video tokens within LLMs, we develop a dynamic masking strategy with tailor-made training objectives. For particularly long videos, we have also designed a global-local input module to balance efficiency and effectiveness. Consequently, we harness LLM for proficient spatial-temporal modeling, while upholding efficiency and stability. Extensive experimental results attest to the effectiveness of our method. Through a more concise model and training pipeline, ST-LLM establishes a new state-of-the-art result on VideoChatGPT-Bench and MVBench. Codes have been available at https://github.com/TencentARC/ST-LLM.

Mug-STAN: Adapting Image-Language Pretrained Models for General Video Understanding

Large-scale image-language pretrained models, e.g., CLIP, have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in acquiring general multi-modal knowledge through web-scale image-text data. Despite the impressive performance of image-language models on various image tasks, how to effectively expand them on general video understanding remains an area of ongoing exploration. In this paper, we investigate the image-to-video transferring from the perspective of the model and the data, unveiling two key obstacles impeding the adaptation of image-language models: non-generalizable temporal modeling and partially misaligned video-text data. To address these challenges, we propose Spatial-Temporal Auxiliary Network with Mutual-guided alignment module (Mug-STAN), a simple yet effective framework extending image-text model to diverse video tasks and video-text data.Specifically, STAN adopts a branch structure with decomposed spatial-temporal modules to enable generalizable temporal modeling, while Mug suppresses misalignment by introducing token-wise feature aggregation of either modality from the other. Extensive experimental results verify Mug-STAN significantly improves adaptation of language-image pretrained models such as CLIP and CoCa at both video-text post-pretraining and finetuning stages. With our solution, state-of-the-art zero-shot and finetuning results on various downstream datasets, including MSR-VTT, DiDeMo, LSMDC, Kinetics-400, Something-Something-2, HMDB-51, UCF- 101, and AVA, are achieved. Moreover, by integrating pretrained Mug-STAN with the emerging multimodal dialogue model, we can realize zero-shot video chatting. Codes are available at https://github.com/farewellthree/STAN

One For All: Video Conversation is Feasible Without Video Instruction Tuning

The recent progress in Large Language Models (LLM) has spurred various advancements in image-language conversation agents, while how to build a proficient video-based dialogue system is still under exploration. Considering the extensive scale of LLM and visual backbone, minimal GPU memory is left for facilitating effective temporal modeling, which is crucial for comprehending and providing feedback on videos. To this end, we propose Branching Temporal Adapter (BT-Adapter), a novel method for extending image-language pretrained models into the video domain. Specifically, BT-Adapter serves as a plug-and-use temporal modeling branch alongside the pretrained visual encoder, which is tuned while keeping the backbone frozen. Just pretrained once, BT-Adapter can be seamlessly integrated into all image conversation models using this version of CLIP, enabling video conversations without the need for video instructions. Besides, we develop a unique asymmetric token masking strategy inside the branch with tailor-made training tasks for BT-Adapter, facilitating faster convergence and better results. Thanks to BT-Adapter, we are able to empower existing multimodal dialogue models with strong video understanding capabilities without incurring excessive GPU costs. Without bells and whistles, BT-Adapter achieves (1) state-of-the-art zero-shot results on various video tasks using thousands of fewer GPU hours. (2) better performance than current video chatbots without any video instruction tuning. (3) state-of-the-art results of video chatting using video instruction tuning, outperforming previous SOTAs by a large margin.

Revisiting Temporal Modeling for CLIP-based Image-to-Video Knowledge Transferring

Image-text pretrained models, e.g., CLIP, have shown impressive general multi-modal knowledge learned from large-scale image-text data pairs, thus attracting increasing attention for their potential to improve visual representation learning in the video domain. In this paper, based on the CLIP model, we revisit temporal modeling in the context of image-to-video knowledge transferring, which is the key point for extending image-text pretrained models to the video domain. We find that current temporal modeling mechanisms are tailored to either high-level semantic-dominant tasks (e.g., retrieval) or low-level visual pattern-dominant tasks (e.g., recognition), and fail to work on the two cases simultaneously. The key difficulty lies in modeling temporal dependency while taking advantage of both high-level and low-level knowledge in CLIP model. To tackle this problem, we present Spatial-Temporal Auxiliary Network (STAN) -- a simple and effective temporal modeling mechanism extending CLIP model to diverse video tasks. Specifically, to realize both low-level and high-level knowledge transferring, STAN adopts a branch structure with decomposed spatial-temporal modules that enable multi-level CLIP features to be spatial-temporally contextualized. We evaluate our method on two representative video tasks: Video-Text Retrieval and Video Recognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model over the state-of-the-art methods on various datasets, including MSR-VTT, DiDeMo, LSMDC, MSVD, Kinetics-400, and Something-Something-V2. Codes will be available at https://github.com/farewellthree/STAN