This work proposes TimeChat, a time-sensitive multimodal large language model specifically designed for long video understanding. Our model incorporates two key architectural contributions: (1) a timestamp-aware frame encoder that binds visual content with the timestamp of each frame, and (2) a sliding video Q-Former that produces a video token sequence of varying lengths to accommodate videos of various durations. Additionally, we construct an instruction-tuning dataset, encompassing 6 tasks and a total of 125K instances, to further enhance TimeChat's instruction-following performance. Experiment results across various video understanding tasks, such as dense captioning, temporal grounding, and highlight detection, demonstrate TimeChat's strong zero-shot temporal localization and reasoning capabilities. For example, it achieves +9.2 F1 score and +2.8 CIDEr on YouCook2, +5.8 HIT@1 on QVHighlights, and +27.5 R@1 (IoU=0.5) on Charades-STA, compared to state-of-the-art video large language models, holding the potential to serve as a versatile video assistant for long-form video comprehension tasks and satisfy realistic user requirements.
@article{arxiv.2312.02051,
title = {TimeChat: A Time-sensitive Multimodal Large Language Model for Long Video Understanding},
author = {Shuhuai Ren and Linli Yao and Shicheng Li and Xu Sun and Lu Hou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.02051},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
CVPR 2024 camera-ready version, code is available at https://github.com/RenShuhuai-Andy/TimeChat