Panda-70M: Captioning 70M Videos with Multiple Cross-Modality Teachers
Authors: name: Tsai-Shien Chen, name: Aliaksandr Siarohin, name: Willi Menapace, name: Ekaterina Deyneka, name: Hsiang-wei Chao, name: Byung Eun Jeon, name: Yuwei Fang, name: Hsin-Ying Lee, name: Jian Ren, name: Ming-Hsuan Yang, name: Sergey Tulyakov

The quality of the data and annotation upper-bounds the quality of a
downstream model. While there exist large text corpora and image-text pairs,
high-quality video-text data is much harder to collect. First of all, manual
labeling is more time-consuming, as it requires an annotator to watch an entire
video. Second, videos have a temporal dimension, consisting of several scenes
stacked together, and showing multiple actions. Accordingly, to establish a
video dataset with high-quality captions, we propose an automatic approach
leveraging multimodal inputs, such as textual video description, subtitles, and
individual video frames. Specifically, we curate 3.8M high-resolution videos
from the publicly available HD-VILA-100M dataset. We then split them into
semantically consistent video clips, and apply multiple cross-modality teacher
models to obtain captions for each video. Next, we finetune a retrieval model
on a small subset where the best caption of each video is manually selected and
then employ the model in the whole dataset to select the best caption as the
annotation. In this way, we get 70M videos paired with high-quality text
captions. We dub the dataset as Panda-70M. We show the value of the proposed
dataset on three downstream tasks: video captioning, video and text retrieval,
and text-driven video generation. The models trained on the proposed data score
substantially better on the majority of metrics across all the tasks.