TCR: Short Video Title Generation and Cover Selection with Attention Refinement

With the widespread popularity of user-generated short videos, it becomes increasingly challenging for content creators to promote their content to potential viewers. Automatically generating appealing titles and covers for short videos can help grab viewers' attention. Existing studies on video captioning mostly focus on generating factual descriptions of actions, which do not conform to video titles intended for catching viewer attention. Furthermore, research for cover selection based on multimodal information is sparse. These problems motivate the need for tailored methods to specifically support the joint task of short video title generation and cover selection (TG-CS) as well as the demand for creating corresponding datasets to support the studies. In this paper, we first collect and present a real-world dataset named Short Video Title Generation (SVTG) that contains videos with appealing titles and covers. We then propose a Title generation and Cover selection with attention Refinement (TCR) method for TG-CS. The refinement procedure progressively selects high-quality samples and highly relevant frames and text tokens within each sample to refine model training. Extensive experiments show that our TCR method is superior to various existing video captioning methods in generating titles and is able to select better covers for noisy real-world short videos.