# End-to-end Dense Video Captioning as Sequence Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.08121 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08121/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (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)
- [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)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Adafactor: Adaptive Learning Rates with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04235/) (2018)
- [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)
- [From Recognition to Cognition: Visual Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10830/) (2018)
- [Unicoder-VL: A Universal Encoder for Vision and Language by Cross-modal Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06066/) (2019)
- [Pix2seq: A Language Modeling Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10852/) (2021)
- [Large-Scale Adversarial Training for Vision-and-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06195/) (2020)
- [YouTube-8M: A Large-Scale Video Classification Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08675/) (2016)
- [Pixel-BERT: Aligning Image Pixels with Text by Deep Multi-Modal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00849/) (2020)
- [UniVL: A Unified Video and Language Pre-Training Model for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06353/) (2020)
- [Visual Entailment: A Novel Task for Fine-Grained Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.06706/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Dense Video Captioning with Masked Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00819/) (2018)
- [WikiHow: A Large Scale Text Summarization Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09305/) (2018)
- [Video Summarization with Long Short-term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08110/) (2016)
- [ImageBERT: Cross-modal Pre-training with Large-scale Weak-supervised Image-Text Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07966/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [TimeChat: A Time-sensitive Multimodal Large Language Model for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02051/) (2023)
- [Vid2Seq: Large-Scale Pretraining of a Visual Language Model for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14115/) (2023)
- [REFLECT: Summarizing Robot Experiences for Failure Explanation and Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15724/) (2023)
- [Streaming Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01297/) (2024)
- [VidChapters-7M: Video Chapters at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13952/) (2023)
- [Do You Remember? Dense Video Captioning with Cross-Modal Memory Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07610/) (2024)
- [A Review of Deep Learning for Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11431/) (2023)
- [Dense Video Captioning: A Survey of Techniques, Datasets and Evaluation Protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02538/) (2023)
- [DIBS: Enhancing Dense Video Captioning with Unlabeled Videos via Pseudo Boundary Enrichment and Online Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02755/) (2024)
- [Seq2Time: Sequential Knowledge Transfer for Video LLM Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16932/) (2024)
- [Enrich and Detect: Video Temporal Grounding with Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17023/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of 3D Dense Captioning: Localizing and Describing Objects in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07469/) (2024)
- [Caption Anything in Video: Fine-grained Object-centric Captioning via Spatiotemporal Multimodal Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05541/) (2025)
- [FunnyNet-W: Multimodal Learning of Funny Moments in Videos in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04210/) (2024)
- [TemporalVLM: Video LLMs for Temporal Reasoning in Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02930/) (2024)
- [Implicit Location-Caption Alignment via Complementary Masking for Weakly-Supervised Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12791/) (2024)
- [TutoAI: A Cross-domain Framework for AI-assisted Mixed-media Tutorial Creation on Physical Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08049/) (2024)
- [Audio Description Generation in the Era of LLMs and VLMs: A Review of Transferable Generative AI Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08860/) (2024)
- [Zero-Shot Dense Video Captioning by Jointly Optimizing Text and Moment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02682/) (2023)
- [An Initial Exploration: Learning to Generate Realistic Audio for Silent Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12408/) (2023)
- [Multi-Modal Video Topic Segmentation with Dual-Contrastive Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00220/) (2023)
- [Grounded Video Caption Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07584/) (2024)
- [PR-DETR: Injecting Position and Relation Prior for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16082/) (2025)
- [Data Transformation Strategies to Remove Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12677/) (2025)
- [Time-Scaling State-Space Models for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03426/) (2025)
- [DenseStep2M: A Scalable, Training-Free Pipeline for Dense Instructional Video Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26565/) (2026)
- [CodecCap: High-Fidelity Codec-Inspired Residual Modeling for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26967/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dense video captioning aims to identify the events of interest in an input video, and generate descriptive captions for each event. Previous approaches usually follow a two-stage generative process, which first proposes a segment for each event, then renders a caption for each identified segment. Recent advances in large-scale sequence generation pretraining have seen great success in unifying task formulation for a great variety of tasks, but so far, more complex tasks such as dense video captioning are not able to fully utilize this powerful paradigm. In this work, we show how to model the two subtasks of dense video captioning jointly as one sequence generation task, and simultaneously predict the events and the corresponding descriptions. Experiments on YouCook2 and ViTT show encouraging results and indicate the feasibility of training complex tasks such as end-to-end dense video captioning integrated into large-scale pretrained models.