MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding
Authors: Enxin Song, Wenhao Chai, Guanhong Wang, Yucheng Zhang, Haoyang Zhou, Feiyang Wu, Haozhe Chi, Xun Guo, Tian Ye, Yanting Zhang, Yan Lu, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Gaoang Wang

Recently integrating video foundation models and large language models to build a video understanding system can overcome the limitations of specific pre-defined vision tasks. Yet existing systems can only handle videos with very few frames. For long videos the computation complexity memory cost and long-term temporal connection impose additional challenges. Taking advantage of the Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model with tokens in Transformers being employed as the carriers of memory in combination with our specially designed memory mechanism we propose the MovieChat to overcome these challenges. MovieChat achieves state-of-the-art performance in long video understanding along with the released MovieChat-1K benchmark with 1K long video and 14K manual annotations for validation of the effectiveness of our method. The code models and data can be found in https://rese1f.github.io/MovieChat.