UNICORN: A Unified Causal Video-Oriented Language-Modeling Framework for Temporal Video-Language Tasks

Yuanhao Xiong, Yixin Nie, Haotian Liu, Boxin Wang, Jun Chen, Rong Jin, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Lorenzo Torresani, Jie Lei


Abstract
The great success of large language models has encouraged the development of large multimodal models, with a focus on image-language interaction. Despite promising results in various image-language downstream tasks, it is still challenging and unclear how to extend the capabilities of these models to the more complex video domain, especially when dealing with explicit temporal signals. To address the problem in existing large multimodal models, in this paper we adopt visual instruction tuning to build a unified causal video-oriented language modeling framework, named UNICORN. Specifically, we collect a comprehensive dataset under the instruction-following format, and instruction-tune the model accordingly. Experimental results demonstrate that without customized training objectives and intensive pre-training, UNICORN can achieve comparable or better performance on established temporal video-language tasks including moment retrieval, video paragraph captioning and dense video captioning. Moreover, the instruction-tuned model can be used to automatically annotate internet videos with temporally-aligned captions. Compared to commonly used ASR captions, we show that training on our generated captions improves the performance of video-language models on both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings. Source code can be found at https://github.com/xyh97/UNICORN.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.722
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12983–12997
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.722
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Yuanhao Xiong, Yixin Nie, Haotian Liu, Boxin Wang, Jun Chen, Rong Jin, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Lorenzo Torresani, and Jie Lei. 2024. UNICORN: A Unified Causal Video-Oriented Language-Modeling Framework for Temporal Video-Language Tasks. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12983–12997, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UNICORN: A Unified Causal Video-Oriented Language-Modeling Framework for Temporal Video-Language Tasks (Xiong et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.722.pdf