# Dense Video Captioning: A Survey of Techniques, Datasets and Evaluation Protocols

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02538 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02538/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 70 of its 154 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Quo Vadis, Action Recognition? A New Model and the Kinetics Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07750/) (2017)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [Pointer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03134/) (2015)
- [Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4555/) (2014)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Dense-Captioning Events in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00754/) (2017)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01641/) (2017)
- [Towards Automatic Learning of Procedures from Web Instructional Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09788/) (2017)
- [TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02101/) (2017)
- [GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14100/) (2022)
- [Unified Vision-Language Pre-Training for Image Captioning and VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11059/) (2019)
- [VATEX: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Multilingual Dataset for Video-and-Language Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03493/) (2019)
- [Temporal Action Detection with Structured Segment Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06228/) (2017)
- [Vid2Seq: Large-Scale Pretraining of a Visual Language Model for Dense Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14115/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Dense Video Captioning with Masked Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00819/) (2018)
- [Semi-supervised Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.01432/) (2015)
- [Temporal Pyramid Network for Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03548/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Dense Video Captioning with Parallel Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07781/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [StreamKV: Streaming Video Question-Answering with Segment-based KV Cache Retrieval and Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07278/) (2025)
- [Time Blindness: Why Video-Language Models Can't See What Humans Can?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24867/) (2025)
- [ARGUS: Hallucination and Omission Evaluation in Video-LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07371/) (2025)
- [EventVL: Understand Event Streams via Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13707/) (2025)
- [ReMoRa: Multimodal Large Language Model based on Refined Motion Representation for Long-Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16412/) (2026)
- [VDC-Agent: When Video Detailed Captioners Evolve Themselves via Agentic Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19436/) (2025)
- [Audio Description Generation in the Era of LLMs and VLMs: A Review of Transferable Generative AI Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08860/) (2024)
- [Open-Ended Video Game Glitch Detection with Agentic Reasoning and Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07818/) (2026)
- [Temporal and Cross-Modal Alignment for Enhanced Audiovisual Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01667/) (2026)
- [Fine-grained length controllable video captioning with ordinal embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15447/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Surgical Documentation through Multimodal Visual-Temporal Transformers and Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19918/) (2025)
- [ViSIL: Unified Evaluation of Information Loss in Multimodal Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09851/) (2026)
- [Temporal-Oriented Recipe for Transferring Large Vision-Language Model to Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12605/) (2025)
- [Visual Lifelog Retrieval through Captioning-Enhanced Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04010/) (2025)
- [LFS: Learnable Frame Selector for Event-Aware and Temporally Diverse Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14594/) (2026)
- [Toward Scalable Video Narration: A Training-free Approach Using Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17050/) (2025)
- [SAVA-X: Ego-to-Exo Imitation Error Detection via Scene-Adaptive View Alignment and Bidirectional Cross View Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12764/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Untrimmed videos have interrelated events, dependencies, context, overlapping events, object-object interactions, domain specificity, and other semantics that are worth highlighting while describing a video in natural language. Owing to such a vast diversity, a single sentence can only correctly describe a portion of the video. Dense Video Captioning (DVC) aims at detecting and describing different events in a given video. The term DVC originated in the 2017 ActivityNet challenge, after which considerable effort has been made to address the challenge. Dense Video Captioning is divided into three sub-tasks: (1) Video Feature Extraction (VFE), (2) Temporal Event Localization (TEL), and (3) Dense Caption Generation (DCG). This review aims to discuss all the studies that claim to perform DVC along with its sub-tasks and summarize their results. We also discuss all the datasets that have been used for DVC. Lastly, we highlight some emerging challenges and future trends in the field.