TeaserGen: Generating Teasers for Long Documentaries

Authors: Weihan Xu, Paul Pu Liang, Haven Kim, Julian McAuley, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Hao-Wen Dong
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: teaser generation, multimodal learning, vision-language model

Abstract:
Teasers are an effective tool for promoting content in entertainment, commercial and educational fields. However, creating an effective teaser for long videos is challenging for it requires long-range multimodal modeling capability for the input videos, while necessitating maintaining audiovisual alignments, managing scene transitions and preserving factual accuracy for the output teasers. Due to the lack of a publicly-available dataset, progress along this research direction has been hindered. In this work, we present DocumentaryNet, a collection of 1,269 documentaries paired with their teasers, featuring multimodal data streams of video, speech, music, sound effects and narrations. With DocumentaryNet, we propose a new two-stage system for generating teasers from long documentaries. The proposed TeaserGen system first generates the teaser narration from the transcribed narration from the documentary using a pretrained large language model, and then selects the most relevant visual content to accompany the generated narration through language-vision models. For narration-video matching, we explore two approaches: a pretraining-based model using pretrained contrastive language-vision models and a deep sequential model that learns the mapping between the narrations and visuals. Our experimental results show that the pretraining-based approach is more effective at identifying relevant visual content than directly trained deep autoregressive models.

Decision: accept (poster)
Reviewer scores: 6, 6, 3, 5

Reviews and discussion:
<thread>
creation date:
1730277924775

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_hqts

<content>
summary:
This paper presents TeaserGen, a two-stage system for generating promotional teasers for long documentaries. Leveraging a their proposed dataset, DocumentaryNet, the authors aim to generate teasers by first synthesizing teaser narrations from documentary transcripts using a large language model. They then use a language-vision model to select relevant visual content that aligns with the narration. In that process, to avoid repeat frames, they proposed some methods to alleviate. The study compares a pretraining-based model (TeaserGen-PT) and a deep sequential learning model (TeaserGen-LR) for narration-video alignment. Experimental results show some advantages of the pretraining-based approach over directly trained autoregressive models.

strengths:
1)The DocumentaryNet dataset of 1,269 documentary-teaser pairs fills a gap in the community by providing a publicly available resource for multimodal summarization and teaser generation, and the system shows potential for applications in media, advertising, and education for automated content promotion.

2)The inclusion of various evaluation metrics, including scene change rate and repetitiveness, provides a more nuanced assessment of the teaser’s quality.

weaknesses:
1)The approach predominantly relies on pretrained language-vision models, limiting novelty. This reliance raises questions about the model’s true capacity to generate creative outputs, as it functions more as an information retrieval system instead of a real generative system.

2)The proposed model does not consider the alignment of audio cues like music or sound effects with visual elements, which limits its ability to produce emotionally engaging teasers, I've checked in your demo, there also exists this issue, and none of above baseline methods consider this aspect, and if you could consider this, that would be a great contribution in this domain. In this aspect, you get all frames by your frame-matching system driven by the text narration you got from llm, so the audio should also be different correspond to each frame in this proposed hypothesis. And by the way, this multi-stage method, means multi-stage information loss and also your pretrained model from general domain also have information loss, so I don't think this method work well for the task that you work with in this paper.

3)The sentence-by-sentence matching approach does not effectively capture scene continuity, leading to potentially fragmented visual sequences that lack coherence even though you utilized the smoothing and regularisation.

4)The experiments are mainly based on one proprietary dataset (other methods also didn't train on your dataset) and lack extensive ablation studies for elements such as the diffusion prior model and threshold sensitivity, which are critical to understanding the model’s flexibility and robustness.

questions:
1)Line229-230: You should detail this part about how to find the threshold and does it sensitive and what is the pretrained model here. especially in the supplementary material.

2)Line267-268: Please illustate well about the diffusion prior and how it helps and also do you conduct the ablation study about this.

3)Line693-706: You collect these media from three main sources, but in the appendix A that you explain about the dataset, I didn't see any discussion about the copyright for these videos.
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1730343446707

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_vbps

<content>
summary:
- The paper presents TeaserGen, a two-stage system for creating teasers from long documentaries, addressing challenges like audiovisual alignment, smooth transitions, and factual accuracy. To support this, the authors developed DocumentaryNet, a dataset of 1,269 documentaries with teasers, including multimodal elements like video, narration, and sound effects. 

- TeaserGen first generates teaser narration from the documentary’s transcript using a large language model, creating an engaging summary. It then pairs visuals with narration through either a pre-trained contrastive language-vision model or a deep sequential model to match visuals accurately.

- Results show that TeaserGen outperforms baseline models in maintaining coherence and alignment, offering a streamlined approach to automated teaser generation. DocumentaryNet and TeaserGen together provide valuable tools for advancing multimodal content modeling in documentary summarization.

strengths:
- Tackles a unique problem in automated teaser generation for documentaries with TeaserGen, a creative, narration-centered two-stage approach that combines large language models with language-vision models for cohesive narration and visual alignment, showing effective and innovative use of existing technologies.

- Provides solid empirical support with comparisons to baseline models across objective (e.g., F1 score, CLIPScore) and subjective metrics, as well as the introduction of DocumentaryNet, a multimodal dataset with documentary-teaser pairs that enriches resources available for this research area.

- The work has significant potential impact by addressing a real-world gap in video summarization for documentary-style content, with applications in multimedia and educational fields, and establishes a foundation for further multimodal research, likely to stimulate new directions in long-form video modeling.

weaknesses:
- The paper presents an innovative approach to video teaser generation using pretrained language-vision models, but several issues need to be addressed to enhance its clarity and robustness. In rows 210 and 211, there is a notation inconsistency where $S$ is defined as a sequence of language tokens, yet later each $S_i$ is referred to as a waveform (audio signal). This inconsistency creates confusion, and it's crucial for the notation to consistently represent either language tokens or audio waveforms throughout the paper to avoid misunderstandings.

- In Section 4.2.1, the method relies heavily on a single pretrained VTGHS model without sufficient ablation studies or comparisons with alternative architectures, which weakens the validation of the approach. The constraints imposed such as a minimum clip length of three seconds and a one-second overlap between clips, appear arbitrary and lack theoretical or empirical justification, raising questions about their effectiveness and impact on the results. Additionally, using a frame rate of only one frame per second (1 FPS), as mentioned in rows 453 to 455, is inadequate for videos that change dynamically. This low frame rate hinders the model's ability to effectively capture motion and make accurate predictions.

- In Section 4.2.2, the model extracts features at a low frame rate of 1 FPS, causing multiple frames to share identical sentence embeddings. This coarse temporal resolution fails to capture dynamic changes within the video, leading to overly repetitive scenes. The absence of fine-grained temporal annotations in the dataset prevents the model from effectively distinguishing and assigning unique embeddings to semantically similar frames occurring at different times. As a result, the approach struggles to maintain diversity and temporal coherence in the generated visual content.

- Regarding threshold selection, in row 320, the paper states, `We estimate a VTGHLS of 0.64 for the ground truth teasers`, but there is insufficient explanation about the criteria used to select this threshold value. The paper does not analyze how varying this threshold affects the results. Since there are ablation studies on changing the matching score function, as mentioned in Section 5.6, it is necessary to explore this threshold value in more detail to understand its impact on the overall pipeline.

- Table 4 may present an unfair comparison because the TeaserGen models utilize advanced decoding techniques like beam search, which can enhance performance, while the baseline models do not use these techniques. For a fair comparison that accurately reflects each model's true capabilities, all models should employ similar decoding methods.

- A significant limitation in the methodology is the heavy reliance on subjective metrics without incorporating standardized quantitative measures, as mentioned in rows 468 to 470. This over-reliance weakens the study's reproducibility and generalizability. While subjective listening tests provide valuable insights, the absence of automatic evaluation metrics commonly used in natural language processing and computer vision (such as ROUGE, BLEU, BERTScore, or perplexity for the generated narration tex) makes it difficult to objectively compare the results with other approaches or validate the findings across different contexts.

- The TeaserGen-LR model uses a limited architecture with only three transformer layers, which may not capture complex patterns as effectively as the diffusion prior's more extensive 12-block backbone. Relying solely on L2 distance as the loss function might not fully capture perceptual similarities, leading to less nuanced image generation. Additionally, training the model for only 15 epochs on a small test set of 49 documentaries raises concerns about underfitting and limits the generalizability of the results.

- The study does not discuss the potential computational overhead introduced by incorporating the diffusion prior, which could affect the practicality and scalability of the approach. While higher scene change rates may increase visual diversity, they might also compromise the narrative coherence of the generated teasers. Addressing these issues would enhance the study's robustness and applicability.

questions:
- Could you clarify the notation used in rows 210 and 211? Specifically, is  $S$  intended to represent a sequence of language tokens or audio waveforms? Consistent notation throughout the paper would enhance understanding and prevent confusion.

- Have you considered evaluating alternative architectures or conducting ablation studies to assess the robustness of relying solely on the pretrained VTGHL model? Exploring different models could strengthen the validation of your approach.

- What is the rationale behind setting the minimum clip length to three seconds and the overlap between clips to one second? Providing theoretical or empirical justification for these specific constraints would help in understanding their impact on the results.

- Given that a frame rate of 1 FPS may be insufficient for capturing dynamic video content, have you experimented with higher frame rates? How does increasing the frame rate affect the model's ability to capture motion and improve prediction accuracy?

- How does your model address the issue of repetitive scenes arising from multiple frames sharing identical sentence embeddings? Have you explored methods to incorporate fine-grained temporal information or annotations to enhance diversity and temporal coherence?

- Could you elaborate on how the VTGHLS threshold of 0.64 was determined? Additionally, have you investigated how varying this threshold influences the results, perhaps through an ablation study?

-  Given that the TeaserGen-LR model uses only three transformer layers, have you tested deeper architectures to see if they capture complex patterns more effectively? Would increasing the number of layers improve performance?

- Have you considered using standardized quantitative evaluation metrics like ROUGE, BLEU, BERTScore, or perplexity for assessing the generated narration text? Including these metrics could enhance the reproducibility and comparability of your study.

- Relying solely on L2 distance as the loss function might not fully capture perceptual similarities. Have you experimented with alternative loss functions, such as perceptual loss, SSIM loss and so on to potentially achieve more nuanced image generation?

- Considering that the models were trained for only 15 epochs on a relatively small test set of 49 documentaries, have you explored training for more epochs or using a larger dataset? How might this affect model performance and generalizability?  To test the generalizability of your approach, have you considered evaluating the model on additional datasets beyond the 49 documentaries? How does the model perform on different genres or types of video content?

- Could you provide details on the computational resources required by the diffusion prior model? Understanding the computational overhead would help assess the practicality and scalability of your approach in real-world applications.

- Higher scene change rates may enhance visual diversity, have you evaluated their impact on the narrative coherence of the teasers? How do you balance diversity with maintaining a coherent and engaging storyline?

- You employ different CLIP models (CLIP-ViT-B/32 and CLIP-ViT-L/14) for different components of your system. Have you considered the potential inconsistencies this might introduce? Would using the same CLIP model throughout improve the alignment between textual and visual data?

-How does the frame extraction rate influence the model's performance in terms of capturing essential visual information? Have you analyzed the trade-offs between computational efficiency and the richness of visual features at different frame rates?
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1730665106026

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_339o

<content>
summary:
The paper addresses the challenge of creating effective teasers for long videos, the authors introduce DocumentaryNet, a dataset comprising 1,269 documentaries paired with their teasers. The proposed system operates in two stages: 

Teaser Narration Generation: A pretrained large language model (LLM), is prompted to create engaging, story-like narratives with a thought-provoking ending question from the transcription.
Visual Content Selection: For relevant video segments to be selected to match the narration using two methods: a pretrained contrastive language-vision model (TeaserGen-PT) and a deep learning-based sequential model (TeaserGen-LR) that aligns video frames to narration.
TeaserGen-LR frames the narration-video matching as a sequence-to-sequence learning task, where it learns a direct mapping between the sequence of sentences in the teaser narration and the video frames. It uses transformer-based architecture with a diffusion prior to embed narration and visual sequences into a shared embedding space, enabling more nuanced and context-aware matching.

The authors used both objective metrics (like F1 score, CLIPScore, and scene change rate) and subjective user surveys that evaluate in terms of consistency, informativeness, and engagingness, to assess the quality of the teasers. They found that TeaserGen-PT with threshold-based selection often provided better coherence and alignment between video and narration, while TeaserGen-LR benefited from enhanced narration-video correspondence.

strengths:
1. The paper proposes frameworks to generate teasers from documentary using audiovisual alignments and scene-changes.
2. The paper demonstrates robust experiments and comparisons to baseline models.
3. The authors use thorough evaluation on their dataset using both objective metrics (like F1 score and scene change rate) and subjective evaluations (coherence, engagingness) to validate their results.
4. The paper has shown extensive ablation studies.

weaknesses:
1. Limited dataset scale, both for training and testing. Though the dataset is domain specific, still the scale is limited with just 1.2k documentaries.
2. Reliance on pretrained LLM, for teaser narration generation without any check for hallucinations or error compounding due to this step.
3. The work is very domain specific, the framework’s reliance on pretrained language-vision models for narration-video alignment, while effective for documentaries, may struggle with complex visual elements that don’t directly correspond to narration, such as scenes with symbolic or artistic visuals or videos with limited narrative.
4. Comparison with other existing video summarization models is not shown in the paper.

questions:
1. The paper claims generalizability of proposed models, however the work is only shown qualitatively through some examples. It would be interesting to get some quantitative results for the same.

2. Can we see the framework's results on how it adapts to other videos with complex visual elements that don’t directly correspond to narration, such as scenes with symbolic or artistic visuals or videos with limited narrative.

3. Comparison with other existing video summarization models, on how the framework is against other models on this task.
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1730692270021

thread_type:
official_review

<thread_object>
creator: reviewer_uvty

<content>
summary:
This paper introduces TeaserGen, a method for generating teasers for long videos. To address the lack of suitable datasets, it presents the DocumentaryNet dataset, which contains 1,269 documentaries paired with their teasers. The dataset includes streams for video, speech, music, sound effects, and narrations. The proposed method is a two-stage system: first, it generates the teaser narration using a large language model (LLM), and then it uses vision-language models to select the most relevant visual content.

strengths:
- The newly introduced dataset could be valuable for the research community.
- The task is interesting and meaningful.
- The experiments are thorough, and the performance appears good.

weaknesses:
- The system heavily relies on LLMs and vision-language models, which may lead to error accumulation. How can we evaluate whether the teaser narration generated by GPT is effective?
- Some video summarization and highlight detection methods could also be applied to generate teasers, but the paper lacks a comparison with these approaches.

questions:
Please refer to the weaknesses.
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>
<thread>
creation date:
1732773519110

thread_type:
official_comment

<thread_object>
creator: authors

<content>
comment:
We express our gratitude to the reviewers for their constructive feedback. We have made several changes to the paper (highlighted in blue) to address reviewers' concerns. Below is a summary of the strengths highlighted by the reviewers and the concerns raised by the reviewers that we have addressed in the rebuttal.

[**Strengths highlighted by the reviewers**]

1. **Innovative Approach:** A reviewer appreciates our **unique problem-solving** in automated teaser generation through TeaserGen, highlighting its creative and narration-centered two-stage approach. 

2. **Comprehensive Evaluation:** Multiple reviewers commend our thorough evaluation framework, which encompasses objective metrics such as F1 score, CLIPScore, scene change rate, and repetitiveness, along with subjective assessments of coherence, alignment, engagement, and realism. This comprehensive approach effectively demonstrates the model's performance and its advantages over baseline models.

3. **Valuable Dataset:** The introduction of the DocumentaryNet dataset is noted as **addressing a critical gap in multimodal research**. This dataset, comprising 1,269 documentary-teaser pairs, serves as a valuable resource for the research community and supports advancements in teaser generation.

4. **Potential Impact:** **Reviewers highlight the potential applications of our work in media, advertising, and education**. Our approach to automated content promotion could transform how documentary content is marketed, offering practical benefits to the multimedia and educational sectors.

5. **Foundation for Future Research:** One reviewer notes that our work **lays a solid empirical foundation likely to inspire new research directions**, particularly in **long-form video modeling and advanced multimodal interaction techniques**.

[**Concerns raised by the reviewers that we have addressed in the rebuttal**]

We have carefully considered the main concerns raised by the reviewers regarding the quality of the generated narrations, the robustness of our proposed method, and the comparison with existing video summarization models. **In response, we have made several updates to our manuscript, with changes highlighted in blue for clarity**. Below is a brief summary of the modifications:

**1. Main Text:**

We clarify the research scope of this paper where we focus on narration and visual generation in this paper as an initial step toward the ultimate goal of generating teasers with visually-aligned sound effects and background music.

**2. Appendix:**

(a) **More Evaluation**:

Narration Scripts: Although we conduct subjective tests to evaluate the organization, informativeness and engagingness of our generated narration, we add an objective evaluation on LLM-Generationed  narration with ROUGE.

Zero-shot: Objective evaluation on zero-shot scenario performance to show the robustness of our proposed method. Results show that our model is more robust than existing video summarization methods in creating teasers. This can be further showcased on our demo page (https://54321anonymous.github.io/ICLR2025/). 

(b) **Comparison with another two SOTA video summarization models:**

CSTA and A2Summ: We observe that TeaserGen achieves a higher F1 score than CSTA, UniVTG, and CLIP-IT and A2Summ. In addition, TeaserGen demonstrates a scene change rate more closely aligned with the ground truth and TeaserGen-LR has the highest CLIPScore.

(c) **Clarification Regarding Reviewer Feedback on the TeaserGen-PT Searching Algorithm:** 

We would like point out that the estimated VTGHLS value of 0.64 for the ground truth, as reported in Table 3, is included solely for comparison purposes. It is not used at any stage in our training or inference pipeline.

(d) **More ablation study:**

Experiments on Minimum Clip length and overlapping tolerance of TeaserGen-PT

(e) **More details:**

Dataset Split Details & Comparison with Existing Teaser/Trailer-Body Contents Dataset

3. References:

CSTA: Son et al., CSTA: Spatiotemporal Attention for Video Summarization, CVPR, 2024 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.11905)
</content>
</thread_object>

</thread>


Metareview:
metareview:
The paper introduces a novel method for generating teaser clips, accompanied by a new benchmark. It received mixed reviews: two negative and two positive. The concerns raised were mostly minor, focusing on engineering aspects and stemming from misunderstandings. Although the authors' rebuttal appears to have effectively addressed these issues, the reviewers have not actively engaged with the rebuttal. Given that the authors successfully resolved the concerns, the AC concludes that the merits of the proposed work outweigh its flaws.