# End-to-end Generative Pretraining for Multimodal Video Captioning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.08264 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08264/

## Key facts

- Cited by 116 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Learning of Visual Representations from Uncurated Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06430/) (2019)
- [Multi-modal Transformer for Video Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10639/) (2020)
- [HERO: Hierarchical Encoder for Video+Language Omni-representation Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00200/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Billion-scale semi-supervised learning for image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00546/) (2019)
- [A Joint Sequence Fusion Model for Video Question Answering and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.02559/) (2018)
- [Support-set bottlenecks for video-text representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02824/) (2020)
- [Multi-modal Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07758/) (2020)
- [AVLnet: Learning Audio-Visual Language Representations from Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09199/) (2020)
- [Object Relational Graph with Teacher-Recommended Learning for Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11566/) (2020)
- [HiT: Hierarchical Transformer with Momentum Contrast for Video-Text Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15049/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 116)

- [GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14100/) (2022)
- [Panda-70M: Captioning 70M Videos with Multiple Cross-Modality Teachers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19479/) (2024)
- [Vid2Seq: Large-Scale Pretraining of a Visual Language Model for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14115/) (2023)
- [PaLI-X: On Scaling up a Multilingual Vision and Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18565/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Video Question Answering via Frozen Bidirectional Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08155/) (2022)
- [Learning Video Representations from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04501/) (2022)
- [Any-to-Any Generation via Composable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11846/) (2023)
- [mPLUG-2: A Modularized Multi-modal Foundation Model Across Text, Image and Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00402/) (2023)
- [Large-scale Multi-Modal Pre-trained Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10035/) (2023)
- [VALOR: Vision-Audio-Language Omni-Perception Pretraining Model and Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08345/) (2023)
- [Language Models with Image Descriptors are Strong Few-Shot Video-Language Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10747/) (2022)
- [Video ReCap: Recursive Captioning of Hour-Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13250/) (2024)
- [VindLU: A Recipe for Effective Video-and-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05051/) (2022)
- [Verbs in Action: Improving verb understanding in video-language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06708/) (2023)
- [An Empirical Study of End-to-End Video-Language Transformers with Masked Visual Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01540/) (2022)
- [MoReVQA: Exploring Modular Reasoning Models for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06511/) (2024)
- [LAVENDER: Unifying Video-Language Understanding as Masked Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07160/) (2022)
- [HiTeA: Hierarchical Temporal-Aware Video-Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14546/) (2022)
- [VideoCoCa: Video-Text Modeling with Zero-Shot Transfer from Contrastive Captioners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04979/) (2022)
- [CoDi-2: In-Context, Interleaved, and Interactive Any-to-Any Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18775/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Multimodal Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01008/) (2023)
- [SoccerNet-Caption: Dense Video Captioning for Soccer Broadcasts Commentaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04565/) (2023)
- [Generative Pre-trained Transformer: A Comprehensive Review on Enabling Technologies, Potential Applications, Emerging Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10435/) (2023)
- [Explainable and Interpretable Multimodal Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02104/) (2024)
- [AutoAD: Movie Description in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16899/) (2023)
- [AutoAD II: The Sequel -- Who, When, and What in Movie Audio Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06838/) (2023)
- [Procedure-Aware Pretraining for Instructional Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18230/) (2023)
- [Context-Guided Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01578/) (2024)
- [UnIVAL: Unified Model for Image, Video, Audio and Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16184/) (2023)
- [InstructVid2Vid: Controllable Video Editing with Natural Language Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12328/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent video and language pretraining frameworks lack the ability to generate sentences. We present Multimodal Video Generative Pretraining (MV-GPT), a new pretraining framework for learning from unlabelled videos which can be effectively used for generative tasks such as multimodal video captioning. Unlike recent video-language pretraining frameworks, our framework trains both a multimodal video encoder and a sentence decoder jointly. To overcome the lack of captions in unlabelled videos, we leverage the future utterance as an additional text source and propose a bidirectional generation objective -- we generate future utterances given the present mulitmodal context, and also the present utterance given future observations. With this objective, we train an encoder-decoder model end-to-end to generate a caption from raw pixels and transcribed speech directly. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance for multimodal video captioning on four standard benchmarks, as well as for other video understanding tasks such as VideoQA, video retrieval and action classification.