Cockatiel: Ensembling Synthetic and Human Preferenced Training for
  Detailed Video Caption
Authors: name: Luozheng Qin; name: Zhiyu Tan; name: Mengping Yang; name: Xiaomeng Yang; name: Hao Li
Published: 2025-03-12 11:25:04

Abstract: Video Detailed Captioning (VDC) is a crucial task for vision-language
bridging, enabling fine-grained descriptions of complex video content. In this
paper, we first comprehensively benchmark current state-of-the-art approaches
and systematically identified two critical limitations: biased capability
towards specific captioning aspect and misalignment with human preferences. To
address these deficiencies, we propose Cockatiel, a novel three-stage training
pipeline that ensembles synthetic and human-aligned training for improving VDC
performance. In the first stage, we derive a scorer from a meticulously
annotated dataset to select synthetic captions high-performing on certain
fine-grained video-caption alignment and human-preferred while disregarding
others. Then, we train Cockatiel-13B, using this curated dataset to infuse it
with assembled model strengths and human preferences. Finally, we further
distill Cockatiel-8B from Cockatiel-13B for the ease of usage. Extensive
quantitative and qualitative experiments reflect the effectiveness of our
method, as we not only set new state-of-the-art performance on VDCSCORE in a
dimension-balanced way but also surpass leading alternatives on human
preference by a large margin as depicted by the human evaluation results.