# FIBER: Fill-in-the-Blanks as a Challenging Video Understanding Evaluation Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.04182 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04182/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01641/) (2017)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [ActivityNet-QA: A Dataset for Understanding Complex Web Videos via Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02467/) (2019)
- [Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01753/) (2016)
- [TVQA: Localized, Compositional Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01696/) (2018)
- [Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09457/) (2017)
- [VATEX: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Multilingual Dataset for Video-and-Language Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03493/) (2019)
- [TGIF-QA: Toward Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04497/) (2017)
- [HERO: Hierarchical Encoder for Video+Language Omni-representation Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00200/) (2020)
- [Don't Just Assume; Look and Answer: Overcoming Priors for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00377/) (2017)
- [MovieQA: Understanding Stories in Movies through Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02902/) (2015)
- [ActBERT: Learning Global-Local Video-Text Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07231/) (2020)
- [UniVL: A Unified Video and Language Pre-Training Model for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06353/) (2020)
- [Just Ask: Learning to Answer Questions from Millions of Narrated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00451/) (2020)
- [MovieNet: A Holistic Dataset for Movie Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10937/) (2020)
- [Movie Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.03705/) (2016)
- [How2: A Large-scale Dataset for Multimodal Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00347/) (2018)
- [TGIF: A New Dataset and Benchmark on Animated GIF Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02748/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning from Narrated Instruction Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.09215/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [EgoSchema: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Very Long-form Video Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09126/) (2023)
- [Video Question Answering: Datasets, Algorithms and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01225/) (2022)
- [Video-Language Understanding: A Survey from Model Architecture, Model Training, and Data Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05615/) (2024)
- [FunQA: Towards Surprising Video Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14899/) (2023)
- [VideoCoT: A Video Chain-of-Thought Dataset with Active Annotation Tool](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05355/) (2024)
- [Position: Measure Dataset Diversity, Don't Just Claim It](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08188/) (2024)
- [EduQG: A Multi-format Multiple Choice Dataset for the Educational Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06104/) (2022)
- [Two is Better than Many? Binary Classification as an Effective Approach to Multi-Choice Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.16495/) (2022)
- [World-to-Words: Grounded Open Vocabulary Acquisition through Fast Mapping in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08685/) (2023)
- [WildQA: In-the-Wild Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06650/) (2022)
- [Dissecting Multimodality in VideoQA Transformer Models by Impairing Modality Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08889/) (2023)
- [TempCloze: Can Video-LLMs Identify the Missing Middle?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01515/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose fill-in-the-blanks as a video understanding evaluation framework and introduce FIBER -- a novel dataset consisting of 28,000 videos and descriptions in support of this evaluation framework. The fill-in-the-blanks setting tests a model's understanding of a video by requiring it to predict a masked noun phrase in the caption of the video, given the video and the surrounding text. The FIBER benchmark does not share the weaknesses of the current state-of-the-art language-informed video understanding tasks, namely: (1) video question answering using multiple-choice questions, where models perform relatively well because they exploit linguistic biases in the task formulation, thus making our framework challenging for the current state-of-the-art systems to solve; and (2) video captioning, which relies on an open-ended evaluation framework that is often inaccurate because system answers may be perceived as incorrect if they differ in form from the ground truth. The FIBER dataset and our code are available at https://lit.eecs.umich.edu/fiber/.