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ReWind: A New Approach to Long Video Understanding

ReWind helps viewers comprehend long videos using a smart memory system.

Anxhelo Diko, Tinghuai Wang, Wassim Swaileh, Shiyan Sun, Ioannis Patras

― 5 min read


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Have you ever tried to watch a long video and found yourself lost halfway through? You’re not alone! We often struggle with Videos that are over ten minutes long, especially when trying to remember what happened. That's where ReWind comes in. It's a new tool designed to help us understand long videos better by using a smart Memory system.

The Challenge of Long Videos

When it comes to videos, our brains can only juggle so much information at once. It’s like trying to carry too many grocery bags at once-you might drop something! Traditional video models don't handle long videos very well. They forget what happened earlier in the video because they can’t remember all the details, and their memory is like a very forgetful goldfish.

To tackle this challenge, ReWind was created. This model keeps track of Important moments in the video and helps answer questions about it, making it easier for us to follow along and understand the content.

How ReWind Works

ReWind uses a two-part system, similar to how you might take notes in class and then review them later. Here’s a breakdown of how it works:

Stage One: Memory and Learning

In the first stage, ReWind acts like a diligent student taking notes. It has a special memory module that remembers key visuals and sounds as the video plays. This memory is dynamic, meaning it updates as new information comes in. It looks at previous Frames and captures the most important details to keep track of the story.

This memory system doesn’t hold all the information but focuses on what matters according to the video’s instructions. So, if a video is about cooking, it will remember steps like chopping vegetables or boiling water, while forgetting the less important bits, like the exact shade of the kitchen walls.

Stage Two: Finding Key Moments

Once ReWind has stored the important details, it enters the second stage. Here, it selects the best frames-these are the high-quality images that show essential moments in the video. This way, it allows us to see clearer pictures of the key Events without overwhelming us with information. It’s like choosing just the right scenes from a movie to remind you of the plot, without having to watch the entire thing again!

After picking the best frames, these images are processed together with the memory information, and the combined data is fed into a language model that generates answers to our questions.

ReWind's Achievements

So, what does this magic do for us? ReWind is great at answering questions about videos, even when they are long. It has been tested on video question answering and temporal grounding tasks, which sound fancy but are essentially about figuring out when things happen in a video and answering questions about them.

In tests, ReWind performed way better than previous models-imagine acing a test while everyone else struggles to finish! It achieved impressive results on the MovieChat-1K dataset and the Charades-STA dataset, both of which involve long and complex videos.

Why is This Important?

The ability to effectively understand long videos has many real-world applications. For example, think about educational videos or online tutorials. With ReWind, students could grasp concepts better, making learning more enjoyable-and maybe even fun! It can also help those who need video guides for tasks, such as home repairs or cooking, ensuring they don’t miss any crucial steps.

Learning from Different Events

ReWind isn't just focused on understanding videos step-by-step-it also has the ability to track events over time. This means it remembers the progression of events in a video, much like a viewer would in a suspenseful movie. Imagine watching a thriller where every twist and turn matters! It’s crucial for models like ReWind to keep track of these dynamics so that we can enjoy the thrill without getting confused.

Practical Uses

ReWind can serve a variety of purposes beyond just answering trivia about videos. Here are a few examples:

  • Real-Time Interfaces: In self-driving cars, a video understanding model like ReWind could help the car recognize road signs, pedestrians, and traffic videos, making navigation smoother and safer.

  • Sound & Vision for the Visually Impaired: It could generate detailed descriptions of video content for visually impaired users, enhancing their engagement and experience.

  • Health and Safety Videos: In workplaces, ReWind can analyze training videos and provide real-time answers to safety questions, improving compliance and understanding.

The Future of Video Understanding

ReWind is just a glimpse into what the future holds for video understanding. As technology evolves, we can expect even more sophisticated tools that can remember details across longer videos, making content more accessible and enjoyable.

Imagine a world where complex videos are as easy to digest as a short TikTok clip! That’s the dream.

Conclusion

In summary, ReWind is a step forward in our quest to better understand long videos. With its unique memory system, it’s able to remember important details and help us make sense of what we watch. This innovation not only enhances our viewing experience but also opens doors to various applications that can benefit society.

Now, whenever you watch a long video, you just might think of ReWind helping you out. It’s like having a personal assistant who knows exactly what you need to stay on track-all while you sit back and enjoy the show!

Original Source

Title: ReWind: Understanding Long Videos with Instructed Learnable Memory

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are crucial for applications requiring integrated understanding textual and visual information. However, existing VLMs struggle with long videos due to computational inefficiency, memory limitations, and difficulties in maintaining coherent understanding across extended sequences. To address these challenges, we introduce ReWind, a novel memory-based VLM designed for efficient long video understanding while preserving temporal fidelity. ReWind operates in a two-stage framework. In the first stage, ReWind maintains a dynamic learnable memory module with a novel \textbf{read-perceive-write} cycle that stores and updates instruction-relevant visual information as the video unfolds. This module utilizes learnable queries and cross-attentions between memory contents and the input stream, ensuring low memory requirements by scaling linearly with the number of tokens. In the second stage, we propose an adaptive frame selection mechanism guided by the memory content to identify instruction-relevant key moments. It enriches the memory representations with detailed spatial information by selecting a few high-resolution frames, which are then combined with the memory contents and fed into a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate the final answer. We empirically demonstrate ReWind's superior performance in visual question answering (VQA) and temporal grounding tasks, surpassing previous methods on long video benchmarks. Notably, ReWind achieves a +13\% score gain and a +12\% accuracy improvement on the MovieChat-1K VQA dataset and an +8\% mIoU increase on Charades-STA for temporal grounding.

Authors: Anxhelo Diko, Tinghuai Wang, Wassim Swaileh, Shiyan Sun, Ioannis Patras

Last Update: 2024-11-23 00:00:00

Language: English

Source URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.15556

Source PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15556

Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Changes: This summary was created with assistance from AI and may have inaccuracies. For accurate information, please refer to the original source documents linked here.

Thank you to arxiv for use of its open access interoperability.

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