# M3L: Language-based Video Editing via Multi-Modal Multi-Level Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01122 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01122/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10485/) (2017)
- [StackGAN: Text to Photo-realistic Image Synthesis with Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03242/) (2016)
- [MoCoGAN: Decomposing Motion and Content for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.04993/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Video Representations using LSTMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.04681/) (2015)
- [Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06601/) (2018)
- [Generating Videos with Scene Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02612/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Filter Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09673/) (2016)
- [Deep multi-scale video prediction beyond mean square error](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05440/) (2015)
- [Scalable Gradients for Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01328/) (2020)
- [Cross-Modal Self-Attention Network for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04745/) (2019)
- [cGANs with Projection Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05637/) (2018)
- [Stochastic Video Generation with a Learned Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07687/) (2018)
- [Stochastic Variational Video Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11252/) (2017)
- [Video Frame Synthesis using Deep Voxel Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.02463/) (2017)
- [Temporal Generative Adversarial Nets with Singular Value Clipping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06624/) (2016)
- [Few-shot Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12713/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [An Empirical Study of End-to-End Video-Language Transformers with Masked Visual Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01540/) (2022)
- [Language-Bridged Spatial-Temporal Interaction for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03789/) (2022)
- [Language-Driven Image Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00178/) (2021)
- [Tell Me What Happened: Unifying Text-guided Video Completion via Multimodal Masked Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12824/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Dialog Systems with Dual Knowledge-enhanced Generative Pretrained Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07934/) (2022)
- [Text-guided 3D Human Generation from 2D Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14312/) (2023)
- [Fully Transformer-Equipped Architecture for End-to-End Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11933/) (2023)
- [Detecting Localized Deepfake Manipulations Using Action Unit-Guided Video Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22121/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video editing tools are widely used nowadays for digital design. Although the demand for these tools is high, the prior knowledge required makes it difficult for novices to get started. Systems that could follow natural language instructions to perform automatic editing would significantly improve accessibility. This paper introduces the language-based video editing (LBVE) task, which allows the model to edit, guided by text instruction, a source video into a target video. LBVE contains two features: 1) the scenario of the source video is preserved instead of generating a completely different video; 2) the semantic is presented differently in the target video, and all changes are controlled by the given instruction. We propose a Multi-Modal Multi-Level Transformer (M3L) to carry out LBVE. M3L dynamically learns the correspondence between video perception and language semantic at different levels, which benefits both the video understanding and video frame synthesis. We build three new datasets for evaluation, including two diagnostic and one from natural videos with human-labeled text. Extensive experimental results show that M3L is effective for video editing and that LBVE can lead to a new field toward vision-and-language research.