ST-LLM: Large Language Models Are Effective Temporal Learners
Authors: name: Ruyang Liu, name: Chen Li, name: Haoran Tang, name: Yixiao Ge, name: Ying Shan, name: Ge Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive capabilities in text
comprehension and generation, prompting research efforts towards video LLMs to
facilitate human-AI interaction at the video level. However, how to effectively
encode and understand videos in video-based dialogue systems remains to be
solved. In this paper, we investigate a straightforward yet unexplored
question: Can we feed all spatial-temporal tokens into the LLM, thus delegating
the task of video sequence modeling to the LLMs? Surprisingly, this simple
approach yields significant improvements in video understanding. Based upon
this, we propose ST-LLM, an effective video-LLM baseline with Spatial-Temporal
sequence modeling inside LLM. Furthermore, to address the overhead and
stability issues introduced by uncompressed video tokens within LLMs, we
develop a dynamic masking strategy with tailor-made training objectives. For
particularly long videos, we have also designed a global-local input module to
balance efficiency and effectiveness. Consequently, we harness LLM for
proficient spatial-temporal modeling, while upholding efficiency and stability.
Extensive experimental results attest to the effectiveness of our method.
Through a more concise model and training pipeline, ST-LLM establishes a new
state-of-the-art result on VideoChatGPT-Bench and MVBench. Codes have been
available at https://github.com/TencentARC/ST-LLM.