Ocean4Rec: Offline LLM-Derived OCEAN Profiles for Request-Time VOD Reranking

Industrial video-on-demand (VOD) recommenders need richer content understanding, but LLM-as-reranker designs repeat prompt construction, token generation, model invocation, output parsing, and fallback handling for each request. In high-volume latency-sensitive services, these request-time operations complicate throughput planning, tail-latency control, capacity isolation, and predictable operation. This paper presents Ocean4Rec, a reranking layer that uses an LLM only offline to materialize item OCEAN profiles from content metadata. Items are mapped into Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism scores, while user profiles are built by time-decayed aggregation of recently clicked and deep-linked items in the same five-dimensional space. At request time, Ocean4Rec joins precomputed item profiles, user profiles, base recommender scores, and catalog recency, then performs numeric reranking without an LLM call. On anonymized Samsung Smart TV VOD logs, same-candidate Top1000 temporal-holdout offline evaluations show that Ocean4Rec improves NDCG@20 over a stronger non-OCEAN Base+Recency ordering by 7.6% for an NCF generator and 61.5% for a LightGCN generator. HR@20 is inconclusive for NCF and improves by 67.3% for LightGCN, reflecting sparse exact-item replay labels and the strength of recency as an industrial baseline. The result should be read as offline replay evidence for a bounded auxiliary content-taste feature that preserves the deployability advantage of a request-time-LLM-free serving path.

An Image Grid Can Be Worth a Video: Zero-shot Video Question Answering Using a VLM

Stimulated by the sophisticated reasoning capabilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs), a variety of strategies for bridging video modality have been devised. A prominent strategy involves Video Language Models (VideoLMs), which train a learnable interface with video data to connect advanced vision encoders with LLMs. Recently, an alternative strategy has surfaced, employing readily available foundation models, such as VideoLMs and LLMs, across multiple stages for modality bridging. In this study, we introduce a simple yet novel strategy where only a single Vision Language Model (VLM) is utilized. Our starting point is the plain insight that a video comprises a series of images, or frames, interwoven with temporal information. The essence of video comprehension lies in adeptly managing the temporal aspects along with the spatial details of each frame. Initially, we transform a video into a single composite image by arranging multiple frames in a grid layout. The resulting single image is termed as an image grid. This format, while maintaining the appearance of a solitary image, effectively retains temporal information within the grid structure. Therefore, the image grid approach enables direct application of a single high-performance VLM without necessitating any video-data training. Our extensive experimental analysis across ten zero-shot video question answering benchmarks, including five open-ended and five multiple-choice benchmarks, reveals that the proposed Image Grid Vision Language Model (IG-VLM) surpasses the existing methods in nine out of ten benchmarks.