# VideoOFA: Two-Stage Pre-Training for Video-to-Text Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.03204 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03204/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 51 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [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)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [LXMERT: Learning Cross-Modality Encoder Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07490/) (2019)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [Video Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13230/) (2021)
- [VL-BERT: Pre-training of Generic Visual-Linguistic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08530/) (2019)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [Self-critical Sequence Training for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00563/) (2016)
- [GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14100/) (2022)
- [Less is More: ClipBERT for Video-and-Language Learning via Sparse Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06183/) (2021)
- [VATEX: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Multilingual Dataset for Video-and-Language Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03493/) (2019)
- [Unifying Vision-and-Language Tasks via Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02779/) (2021)
- [HERO: Hierarchical Encoder for Video+Language Omni-representation Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00200/) (2020)
- [MERLOT: Multimodal Neural Script Knowledge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02636/) (2021)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [An Introduction to Vision-Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17247/) (2024)
- [Mirasol3B: A Multimodal Autoregressive model for time-aligned and contextual modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05698/) (2023)
- [Whats in a Video: Factorized Autoregressive Decoding for Online Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14688/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a new two-stage pre-training framework for video-to-text generation tasks such as video captioning and video question answering: A generative encoder-decoder model is first jointly pre-trained on massive image-text data to learn fundamental vision-language concepts, and then adapted to video data in an intermediate video-text pre-training stage to learn video-specific skills such as spatio-temporal reasoning. As a result, our VideoOFA model achieves new state-of-the-art performance on four Video Captioning benchmarks, beating prior art by an average of 9.7 points in CIDEr score. It also outperforms existing models on two open-ended Video Question Answering datasets, showcasing its generalization capability as a universal video-to-text model.