# Video in 10 Bits: Few-Bit VideoQA for Efficiency and Privacy

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.08391 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08391/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning with Differential Privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00133/) (2016)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [SlowFast Networks for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03982/) (2018)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [A Closer Look at Spatiotemporal Convolutions for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11248/) (2017)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Learning of Visual Representations from Uncurated Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06430/) (2019)
- [Less is More: ClipBERT for Video-and-Language Learning via Sparse Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06183/) (2021)
- [TVQA: Localized, Compositional Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01696/) (2018)
- [Understanding Deep Image Representations by Inverting Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.0035/) (2014)
- [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)
- [DVC: An End-to-end Deep Video Compression Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00101/) (2018)
- [BMN: Boundary-Matching Network for Temporal Action Proposal Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09702/) (2019)
- [MovieQA: Understanding Stories in Movies through Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02902/) (2015)
- [Full Resolution Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05148/) (2016)
- [Variable Rate Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06085/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Conditional Relation Networks for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10698/) (2020)
- [FVC: A New Framework towards Deep Video Compression in Feature Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09600/) (2021)
- [Video Compression through Image Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06919/) (2018)
- [M-LVC: Multiple Frames Prediction for Learned Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10290/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Object Structure and Dynamics from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07889/) (2019)
- [Location-aware Graph Convolutional Networks for Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09105/) (2020)
- [Improving Deep Video Compression by Resolution-adaptive Flow Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05982/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Characterizing Video Question Answering with Sparsified Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16311/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In Video Question Answering (VideoQA), answering general questions about a video requires its visual information. Yet, video often contains redundant information irrelevant to the VideoQA task. For example, if the task is only to answer questions similar to "Is someone laughing in the video?", then all other information can be discarded. This paper investigates how many bits are really needed from the video in order to do VideoQA by introducing a novel Few-Bit VideoQA problem, where the goal is to accomplish VideoQA with few bits of video information (e.g., 10 bits). We propose a simple yet effective task-specific feature compression approach to solve this problem. Specifically, we insert a lightweight Feature Compression Module (FeatComp) into a VideoQA model which learns to extract task-specific tiny features as little as 10 bits, which are optimal for answering certain types of questions. We demonstrate more than 100,000-fold storage efficiency over MPEG4-encoded videos and 1,000-fold over regular floating point features, with just 2.0-6.6% absolute loss in accuracy, which is a surprising and novel finding. Finally, we analyze what the learned tiny features capture and demonstrate that they have eliminated most of the non-task-specific information, and introduce a Bit Activation Map to visualize what information is being stored. This decreases the privacy risk of data by providing k-anonymity and robustness to feature-inversion techniques, which can influence the machine learning community, allowing us to store data with privacy guarantees while still performing the task effectively.