VideoLLM Knows When to Speak: Enhancing Time-Sensitive Video
  Comprehension with Video-Text Duet Interaction Format
Authors: name: Yueqian Wang, name: Xiaojun Meng, name: Yuxuan Wang, name: Jianxin Liang, name: Jiansheng Wei, name: Huishuai Zhang, name: Dongyan Zhao

Recent researches on video large language models (VideoLLM) predominantly
focus on model architectures and training datasets, leaving the interaction
format between the user and the model under-explored. In existing works, users
often interact with VideoLLMs by using the entire video and a query as input,
after which the model generates a response. This interaction format constrains
the application of VideoLLMs in scenarios such as live-streaming comprehension
where videos do not end and responses are required in a real-time manner, and
also results in unsatisfactory performance on time-sensitive tasks that
requires localizing video segments. In this paper, we focus on a video-text
duet interaction format. This interaction format is characterized by the
continuous playback of the video, and both the user and the model can insert
their text messages at any position during the video playback. When a text
message ends, the video continues to play, akin to the alternative of two
performers in a duet. We construct MMDuetIT, a video-text training dataset
designed to adapt VideoLLMs to video-text duet interaction format. We also
introduce the Multi-Answer Grounded Video Question Answering (MAGQA) task to
benchmark the real-time response ability of VideoLLMs. Trained on MMDuetIT,
MMDuet demonstrates that adopting the video-text duet interaction format
enables the model to achieve significant improvements in various time-sensitive
tasks (76% CIDEr on YouCook2 dense video captioning, 90\% mAP on QVHighlights
highlight detection and 25% R@0.5 on Charades-STA temporal video grounding)
with minimal training efforts, and also enable VideoLLMs to reply in a
real-time manner as the video plays. Code, data and demo are available at:
https://github.com/yellow-binary-tree/MMDuet.