UniVTG: Towards Unified Video-Language Temporal Grounding
Authors: name: Kevin Qinghong Lin, name: Pengchuan Zhang, name: Joya Chen, name: Shraman Pramanick, name: Difei Gao, name: Alex Jinpeng Wang, name: Rui Yan, name: Mike Zheng Shou

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG), which aims to ground target clips from videos
(such as consecutive intervals or disjoint shots) according to custom language
queries (e.g., sentences or words), is key for video browsing on social media.
Most methods in this direction develop taskspecific models that are trained
with type-specific labels, such as moment retrieval (time interval) and
highlight detection (worthiness curve), which limits their abilities to
generalize to various VTG tasks and labels. In this paper, we propose to Unify
the diverse VTG labels and tasks, dubbed UniVTG, along three directions:
Firstly, we revisit a wide range of VTG labels and tasks and define a unified
formulation. Based on this, we develop data annotation schemes to create
scalable pseudo supervision. Secondly, we develop an effective and flexible
grounding model capable of addressing each task and making full use of each
label. Lastly, thanks to the unified framework, we are able to unlock temporal
grounding pretraining from large-scale diverse labels and develop stronger
grounding abilities e.g., zero-shot grounding. Extensive experiments on three
tasks (moment retrieval, highlight detection and video summarization) across
seven datasets (QVHighlights, Charades-STA, TACoS, Ego4D, YouTube Highlights,
TVSum, and QFVS) demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our proposed
framework. The codes are available at https://github.com/showlab/UniVTG.