# DeVAn: Dense Video Annotation for Video-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05060 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05060/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Video understanding with MLLMs, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 21 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Video understanding with MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/video-understanding-with-mllms/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [HowTo100M: Learning a Text-Video Embedding by Watching Hundred Million Narrated Video Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03327/) (2019)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [YouTube-8M: A Large-Scale Video Classification Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08675/) (2016)
- [Advancing High-Resolution Video-Language Representation with Large-Scale Video Transcriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10337/) (2021)
- [MERLOT Reserve: Neural Script Knowledge through Vision and Language and Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02639/) (2022)
- [How2: A Large-scale Dataset for Multimodal Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00347/) (2018)
- [TransNet: A deep network for fast detection of common shot transitions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03363/) (2019)

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

- [FKA-Owl: Advancing Multimodal Fake News Detection through Knowledge-Augmented LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01988/) (2024)
- [Can GPT tell us why these images are synthesized? Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models for Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11686/) (2025)
- [VideoConviction: A Multimodal Benchmark for Human Conviction and Stock Market Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08104/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a novel human annotated dataset for evaluating the ability for visual-language models to generate both short and long descriptions for real-world video clips, termed DeVAn (Dense Video Annotation). The dataset contains 8.5K YouTube video clips of 20-60 seconds in duration and covers a wide range of topics and interests. Each video clip is independently annotated by 5 human annotators, producing both captions (1 sentence) and summaries (3-10 sentences). Given any video selected from the dataset and its corresponding ASR information, we evaluate visuallanguage models on either caption or summary generation that is grounded in both the visual and auditory content of the video. Additionally, models are also evaluated on caption- and summary-based retrieval tasks, where the summary-based retrieval task requires the identification of a target video given excerpts of a given summary. Given the novel nature of the paragraph-length video summarization task, we compared different existing evaluation metrics and their alignment with human preferences and found that model-based evaluation metrics provide more semantically-oriented and human-aligned evaluation. Finally, we benchmarked a wide range of current video-language models on DeVAn, and we aim for DeVAn to serve as a useful evaluation set in the age of large language models and complex multi-modal tasks. Code is available at https: //github.com/TK-21st/DeVAn.