# LanguageBind: Extending Video-Language Pretraining to N-modality by Language-based Semantic Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01852 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01852/

## Key facts

- Cited by 370 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [The Kinetics Human Action Video Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.06950/) (2017)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [Two-Stream Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2199/) (2014)
- [mPLUG-Owl: Modularization Empowers Large Language Models with Multimodality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14178/) (2023)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01641/) (2017)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [AVA: A Video Dataset of Spatio-temporally Localized Atomic Visual Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08421/) (2017)
- [InternVideo: General Video Foundation Models via Generative and Discriminative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03191/) (2022)
- [YouTube-8M: A Large-Scale Video Classification Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08675/) (2016)
- [Scaling Language-Image Pre-training via Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00794/) (2022)
- [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)
- [LLVIP: A Visible-infrared Paired Dataset for Low-light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10831/) (2021)
- [Advancing High-Resolution Video-Language Representation with Large-Scale Video Transcriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10337/) (2021)
- [Unmasked Teacher: Towards Training-Efficient Video Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16058/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 370)

- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13372/) (2024)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [VideoLLaMA 2: Advancing Spatial-Temporal Modeling and Audio Understanding in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07476/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-Video: Video Instruction Tuning With Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02713/) (2024)
- [SparseVLM: Visual Token Sparsification for Efficient Vision-Language Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04417/) (2024)
- [Chat-UniVi: Unified Visual Representation Empowers Large Language Models with Image and Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08046/) (2023)
- [InternVideo2: Scaling Foundation Models for Multimodal Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15377/) (2024)
- [VisionZip: Longer is Better but Not Necessary in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04467/) (2024)
- [Open-Sora Plan: Open-Source Large Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00131/) (2024)
- [MLVU: Benchmarking Multi-task Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04264/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14093/) (2024)
- [MM-LLMs: Recent Advances in MultiModal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13601/) (2024)
- [Video Understanding with Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17432/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization of Video Large Multimodal Models from Language Model Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01258/) (2024)
- [MMAudio: Taming Multimodal Joint Training for High-Quality Video-to-Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15322/) (2024)
- [Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01990/) (2025)
- [AdaShield: Safeguarding Multimodal Large Language Models from Structure-based Attack via Adaptive Shield Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09513/) (2024)
- [VideoPrism: A Foundational Visual Encoder for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13217/) (2024)
- [TemporalBench: Benchmarking Fine-grained Temporal Understanding for Multimodal Video Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10818/) (2024)
- [Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10739/) (2024)
- [RAG-Driver: Generalisable Driving Explanations with Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning in Multi-Modal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10828/) (2024)
- [Deep Multimodal Learning with Missing Modality: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07825/) (2024)
- [MotionLLM: Understanding Human Behaviors from Human Motions and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20340/) (2024)
- [Apollo: An Exploration of Video Understanding in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10360/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Resource-efficient LLM and Multimodal Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08092/) (2024)
- [WildVision: Evaluating Vision-Language Models in the Wild with Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11069/) (2024)
- [E.T. Bench: Towards Open-Ended Event-Level Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18111/) (2024)
- [TEOChat: A Large Vision-Language Assistant for Temporal Earth Observation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06234/) (2024)
- [TimeMarker: A Versatile Video-LLM for Long and Short Video Understanding with Superior Temporal Localization Ability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18211/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The video-language (VL) pretraining has achieved remarkable improvement in multiple downstream tasks. However, the current VL pretraining framework is hard to extend to multiple modalities (N modalities, N>=3) beyond vision and language. We thus propose LanguageBind, taking the language as the bind across different modalities because the language modality is well-explored and contains rich semantics. Specifically, we freeze the language encoder acquired by VL pretraining, then train encoders for other modalities with contrastive learning. As a result, all modalities are mapped to a shared feature space, implementing multi-modal semantic alignment. While LanguageBind ensures that we can extend VL modalities to N modalities, we also need a high-quality dataset with alignment data pairs centered on language. We thus propose VIDAL-10M with Video, Infrared, Depth, Audio and their corresponding Language, naming as VIDAL-10M. In our VIDAL-10M, all videos are from short video platforms with complete semantics rather than truncated segments from long videos, and all the video, depth, infrared, and audio modalities are aligned to their textual descriptions. LanguageBind has achieved superior performance on a wide range of 15 benchmarks covering video, audio, depth, and infrared. Moreover, multiple experiments have provided evidence for the effectiveness of LanguageBind in achieving indirect alignment and complementarity among diverse modalities. Code address: https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/LanguageBind